Hot, gusting to 30

Monday morning I woke up to this view: Kansas prairie.  Elevation around 2000 feet. 
I walked Daisy on the Russell, Kansas flatland that morning.   Without scenery to distract me, I was free to wonder why the street names were Amy, Bruce, Barbara, Cecil, Edward.  Not quite alphabetical. Does that bother you too?

The temp was a bit warmish, but the 20-30 mph wind gusts kept me from feeling it.  Little House on the Prairie settlers, I take my hat off to you.  What an environment.  As a security guard at the Eisenhower Memorial said.  "Bright, hot and windy, that's Kansas summer".

You might be wondering how, with that climate,  Kansas attracted any people?  The railroad.

Abilene was the first of many Kansas cities to come into being as a railroad cowtown.  Just after the Civil War one of the early residents  promoted Abilene as a destination for cattle driven from Texas on the Chisolm Trail.  Cows were shipped east for food and west to start new herds in Wyoming and Montana. Abilene and then other towns on the railroad boomed.  In 1871 the largest cattle drive in the history of Abilene recorded 600,000 cattle driven up from Texas. I have a personal connection to this slice of history.  My great great grandfather is enshrined in the Texas Trail Drivers Hall of Fame in San Antonio.   I probably parked the RV overnight where he would have grazed the herds on the prairies south of Abilene before driving on to the auction and the train.  Wonder how he got any sleep with that wind blowing all night?

Winter wheat came to the area in the late 1800's by way of German Russian Mennonites.  Winter wheat is sowed in the fall and sprouts before the freeze.  Then it goes dormant until spring and is harvested the following summer.  The crop 's success pitted cowboys against sodbusters and changed Kansas from Cowtown into the breadbasket of the nation.

Think about that when you look at your sandwich at lunch today.  You might be eating Kansas Hard Winter Wheat.

Grass Roots Art

OMG!  What a town!   Lucas Kansas is beyond funky.  The photo above is their new public toilet, with a tank for the building and a seat out front.  Off to the side is a roll of concrete toilet paper.  This is a most fitting toilet for a town that is the grassroots art capital of the world.  The town only has 400 residents, but most of them do something artsy.  Almost all the artists began creating their work at retirement.

Grassroots art is not our grandma's water colors, but if she could create something with a little concrete, some spare car parts and a welding torch, she'd fit right in in Lucas.  Created by people with no formal art training, grassroots art uses ordinary objects and materials in unique ways.

Samuel Dinsmoor is the grandfather of the movement.  A civil war veteran who was a farmer and wildly progressive thinker, he started building this retirement home in town at the age of 64.  But the time of his death at age 89 he had not only finished this limestone log house but a city block of concrete figures called the Garden of Eden, his own mausoleum (where you can still look at his mummy) and a tourist attraction that has 7000 visitors a year.

The Grassroots Arts Center has works from over 30 artists on display, including this lifesize pull tab car. 

By the time I finished my tour of this little town, I was scratching my head.  What would I do to make my mark in the grassroots movement?  I have reached the age where my talents should be developed.  I just need to decide my medium.  Concrete?  Broken plates? Chewing gum?  Buttons?  Old tools?  Plastic bottles?  Barbie doll heads?  Trash from the river?    So many choices.  Can't believe I spent all that money on water colors when the medium of my future art is right there in my discards.

Presidential junkie

I adore past presidents, well, most of them, and especially ones like Ike.  My first presidential memory is I Like Ike buttons.  Does anyone else from Yoakum remember that they were pasted on the sidewalks?  I was six, so I could be wrong.

And Mamie.  Everyone loved Mamie.

It was worth a fifty mile detour to visit Abilene Kansas to find out more about Ike at his birthplace and resting place.  Above is the house he grew up in with six brothers.  His father worked at the creamery and then the gas company.  Ike too worked at the creamery for two years to help his older brother finish college.  They were working class folks from the poor side of the tracks.

When it was his turn for college, he got an appointment to West Point, giving up the dream of Annapolis because by then he was too old.

Ike came back from WWII a reluctant hero.  He never considered running for President, but he was sought out by so many grass roots campaign groups from both parties that he finally accepted the Republican party nomination. The museum has a movie on Ike that says several times that he never sought his careers, that the job always found the man.

As president, he was concerned with the large military industry that was growing at the expense of other needs of the American people, and he advocated for peaceful solutions.

Once again I left a Presidential Library impressed with the common man who rises to greatness and lives a life of duty.

Get your Q in Cushing

Cushing, OK is the Pipeline Capital of the world, so when they decide to have a cookoff, they PIPE the heat from a central fie tank.  What other way?  Welcome to BBQ and Blues at Cushing.  That's the Sunoco tanker smoker at the top.

Anyone in Oil and Gas knows that you also look to Cushing for the price of West Texas Intermediate.  The surplus or scarcity at Cushing drives price.  Not only are there pipelines, but acres of storage tanks.

But the real fame of Cushing is that it is the residence of my cousin Katy.  Thanks for a good time, Katy!

Waiting to chill

You can park your RV on the hill like this for a while, but leave it too long and the refrigerator will stop working.  That's what masked the refrigerator malfunction that has postponed our plans for Colorado Kool.   We thought we caused it by parking the RV on the slant  for several days.  Carl reset the frig and it started working again.

A few days later it stopped working again, and shame on us, we were three bubbles off plumb that time too.  Once more a reset did the trick.

The following day, when I started loading for our trek, we were dead level.  And the frig was dead, dead, dead.

I found seven service dealers for Norcold frigerators listed in Houston.  The most popular one could see us in 23 days.  Only one, an hour away in Conroe, would take us in the next day.  The manager's name ?  Jill. 

I felt an affinity for Jill when I talked to her on the phone.  Then I watched her skillful handling of Carl's engineering questions and was really impressed.  The girl knows her stuff, and she knows how to handle customers too.  She tells us what is happening about every four hours.  Turns out that diagnosing an ailing RV fridge is a process of bypassing one system at a time and waiting for the frig to run overnight or fail.  Translation:  several days.

Right now the unit seems to be cooling if they bypass all the power supplies and temperature controls and overrides supplied by the RV.  Maybe it's one of those things.  Jill's not saying till she knows.

Meanwhile, all the stops we planned in the next week have been told we are on HOLD.  I definitely don't want to drink warm milk all summer or spend a week at a dealership with Daisy while they run diagnostics. 

I'm comfy here at home with all my possessions packed in piles ready to load.  Looks like an episode of Horders.  We turned internet and cable back on for a few days and will hang till things are chilling again.