Utah Calling........

We're in Denver tonight. We left home last Monday, 4 April, and are headed to Utah to see Zion, and Arches and Capitol Reef  and Bryce Canyon and all of the other wonders of the area. Thus far, the trip has been uneventful and rather dull, which is much preferable to adventures. In my maturity, I have decided adventures are vastly over-rated. With that said, I will add that driving from Kansas City to Denver along I-70 is remarkably dull.

We had a really pleasant lunch at a long-established place just outside of Abilene, "The Old Farm House". It was busy with middle-aged women "doing lunch", and it was a good place to do lunch. The food was good and the place was interesting.

The high point of the trip thus far has been our visit to the Eisenhower Memorial. It's in Abilene, Kansas, where "Ike" grew up in a tiny house with Mom and Dad and five brothers and Grandpa. We started our visit to the Memorial at the house where the family lived from 1896, when Ike's parents bought it for $1000, until 1946 when Mother Eisenhower died. It's a really modest home.

The house we saw was the modern version, the one after electricity and indoor plumbing had been added. They didn't exist when Eisenhower was growing up there.

But grow up he did, to become the most powerful man in the world, the leader of the free world in an era fraught with peril. I'm not going to try to capture his astounding history here, but I recommend that you get smarter about him. I won't say he saved the world, but he surely made it a safer place for us all. He said, "The United States never lost a soldier or a foot of ground in my administration. We kept the peace. People asked how it happened — by God, it didn’t just happen, I’ll tell you that."

 

The campus, as the folks who work in the library and the gift shop like to call it, includes, obviously, the house, a gift shop and a library, as well as a really interesting museum devoted to telling the story of Ike and Mamie. We found it very interesting, and if you plan to visit it, be advised that the best material and artifacts are toward the end of the museum. Save yourself....there is a lot of material there. You can learn more at this web page. and I recommend it.


We're staying in a Comfort Suites motel tonight. It's supposedly "upper end", but many of the folks here look like street people and carnival hands. As we drove into the motel, there were a couple of women who certainly looked like sex industry workers. When we checked in, I saw them using the motel's computer area to do what looked like arranging their evening's work.
The guests at the motel were interesting. There are lots of large women with acres of tattoos and numerous skinny men with ball caps and lots of facial hair. Interesting crowd, for sure, but I don't think we'll use that particular motel again.
That's all for tonight. Stay tuned..........

PS......As we drove through Kansas, we took another special tour through Wright City, looking for the elusive "Elvis is Alive" museum. We'd seen it on a couple of trips several years ago, and then it vanished. We had looked for it without result a couple of years ago, but this year we found it, sort of:

That's the place: The building has changed its mission, and Elvis put down his guitar and picked up the cross, but that's the place.