After a couple hours, and another Junior Ranger badge, we headed south to find Kansas. Disappointingly, since we weren't on a major road, we didn't really even notice we had crossed into Kansas until Kayl noticed that the road signs had sunflowers on them. We hit several long waits at construction, as well as had to wait for a train at one point...
Just south of the border into Kansas, we found Marysville, and a cool little museum with the only remaining Pony Express home station (where they changed riders, as apposed to the relay stations where they just changed horses).
There was a nice video about the (short) history of the Pony Express, and how it ended up running only 19 months. Although a lot of money was put into setting it up, the folks putting together the telegraph lines ended up displacing them. Many of the stations were used later for the stage lines.
There was also some displays in the original stables. The stables not only housed the horses while they weren't on duty, but had the blacksmith supplies to build what they needed to care for them.
Our second surprise of the day came just before we finally found the interstate again (driving through the middle of Kansas is, well, interesting, of a sort...), when we ran across the Oz museum (as in Wizard...).
They had displays and historical information on the MGM movie and all of it's cast. Literally more than you could ever want to know about the movie...
They also had all kinds of collectibles, all 16 of the Oz books (you only know about the one...?), as well as all of the other books L. Frank Baum wrote, even those under the 7 different pseudonyms.
All-in-all they were pretty nice stops, and added a lot to our trip, but got us into Missouri rather late. We'll have to go see the Truman museum & library tomorrow...
Quick Stats:
total mileage so far - 2477
hours driving - 41
States - 9 (62 counties, 6 state capitals)
sites/parks/monuments - 14
Junior Ranger badges - 6 (& 1 Junior Paleontologist badge!)
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