Auntie Em It's a Sand Storm

We were almost out of Kansas as the sun was beginning to set. There was a heavy cloud layer that looked like a storm. I was thinking about how the Wizard of Oz started out in Kansas and I was picturing the tornado that could easily come through the empty grassland we were driving through, when all of a sudden an entirely different sort of storm kicked up.

A sand storm started to roll across the highway in front of us. It was intense, post-apocalyptic and really beautiful.

Wild Apples in Kansas

The drive across Kansas was long. We listened to Huckleberry Finn most of the way. The whole family was sick and grumpy. The one interesting thing of note is that the whole way across Kansas I kept seeing apple trees poking out of clusters of wild unkempt tree stands along the road.

The little yellow spots on the tree in the middle left are apples!

At first I thought maybe they were the result of Johnny Apple Seed, but I looked it up and found a historical record that said specifically that they were not. They had been planted by the pioneers coming to settle Kansas.

I kept doing a double take. It was so hard to believe they could just be apples all over the place in random unclaimed spots that I kept trying to convince myself I was wrong and they were something else. The tree in the middle is definitely an apple tree with huge golden apples on it.

They used them as wind blocks, and had the added benefit of producing fruit. It was so odd to see golden delicious apples, huge and ripe, poking out of the brush and random wild trees along the highway, completely unclaimed and unharvested.

Crossing Missouri

After our day traveling through Lovejoy Family history we decided to keep going into the night and make a rest stop in Kansas City, MO. First we had to drive over the Mississippi and pass through St. Louis. It was really a trip to be crossing the Mississippi again all the way at the top, when we had crossed it over a month ago down near the bottom in Louisiana.

Driving over the Mississippi

Our brief view of St. Louis.

The next day I took Izzy and Hannah to the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City. Eli and Elijah were sick and so we left them in the hotel to rest and hang out.

The American Jazz Museum on the corner of 18th and Vine in the old jazz district of Kansas City includes its own little night club that has really great jazz musicians come through and play on the weekends. Unfortunately we were there on a Tuesday.

The museum is primarily made up of kiosks where you can listen to some of the best jazz recordings ever made. But there are also interactive kiosks like this one where you can mix your own sound using a pre-recorded jazz track.

Izzy really loved this and spent a long time mixing his own jazz recording. He was very excited to have me try it too.

They didn't have a huge amount of exhibit artifacts but they did have items like this dress of Ella Fitzgerald's. I was satisfied.

In the same building as the Jazz museum is the American Baseball Negro League Museum. Izzy desperately wanted to go in and look at it as well. So we paid twice, once for each museum, and went in.

The displays in the Negro League museum were much more elaborate and information heavy.

There were some very moving quotes, and it really seemed to be a missing element of all of the earlier civil rights history we had discovered.

Ultimately Izzy was there for the baseball. He loves baseball.

At the end of the museum is a baseball diamond decorated in life size statues of some of the most famous players.

You can walk through the display. Izzy took this opportunity to pretend to play some ball.

He was so incredibly happy. I clearly need to get this kid on a baseball team.

Outside the museum is a statue of Charlie "Bird" Parker. Izzy insisted I take a picture of them in front of the statue. He said the head of Bird looked like Buddha.

We stayed in Kansas City for a couple of nights, but by the end of the stay the whole family had a bad cold. We ended up seeing very little of the city beyond this excursion. It seemed like the downtown was very nice, but the suburbs really reminded me of Redding. I couldn't tell if it was the climate, the area itself, or my mood because I was feeling so sick.

Lovejoy Family History Day

The state of Illinois contains a variety of Lovejoy family history, from the Owen Lovejoy Homestead to the Elijah Parish Lovejoy monument. As we are starting to grow weary of the road we chose to do all of it in one day. This is no small task as the homestead is in Princeton, IL towards the central north of the state and the monument is in Alton, IL towards the south just across the river from St. Louis, MO.

Here we are officially in front of the Owen Lovejoy Homestead. Owen is Elijah's great great grandfather.

Just across a field and a parking lot is the house where Elijah's grandfather Elijah P. Lovejoy III grew up. It's now the local Elk's Lodge.

The Lovejoy Homestead has been turned into a museum.

It's a lovely old farm house.

With my favorite kind of porch.

The inside has been set up to replicate what an Illinois farm house would have looked like at the time. Some of it is artifacts of Owen Lovejoy and the Lovejoy family, but much of it is normalized for the era.

This is an office desk that would have been like Owen's

This is a photograph of Owen Lovejoy. He was a congressman and a friend of Abraham Lincoln's. He was also an abolitionist, and the younger brother of Elijah Parish Lovejoy who was killed defending his news press from an angry pro-slavery mob.

This spoon was found in the basement of the house. It is inscribed with the name "Lovejoy" on it. It has been framed and put on the wall of the house. Reflected in the glass is some of the current Lovejoys acting out typical Lovejoy behavior.

Not only was Owen an abolitionist, but his house was part of the underground railroad. He openly admitted to helping runaway slaves in a speech to the House of Representatives.

A display of the hiding place for the runaway slaves located in the walls of the house.

Izzy peeking through the entrance to the hiding place.

A replica of the house.

The kids listened to the tour guide tell them about old kitchens and how they work.

Eli asked her questions and communicated some of the information we have learned about old kitchens from the various historical sites we have experienced on our journey.

right near the house is an old school house that was moved to the site to be part of the museum.

The kids really enjoyed being in school, even though it was an old school and just a museum piece.

They all sat at desks and listened to the tour guide, who is a retired teacher, tell them stuff about schools in the old days.

It took us five hours to drive from the homestead in Princeton to the monument in Alton. We passed through and had lunch in Peoria, which turns out to have a very beautiful fancy neighborhood. When we did research on why there had been such wealth in Peoria, it turned out that they used to make alcohol there, and that much of the lions share of the money made doing that happened during prohibition. Up until that time we had always heard Peoria described as the most normal American town. Show biz people used to talk about a joke "playing" in Peoria, as a measure of whether it would be generally acceptable to mainstream America. We did not expect to find the rather fancy town that we were confronted with when we arrived. We had a very nice lunch at a little place called Cyd's. Elijah wanted to take a picture of the kids playing on the playground in Peoria and place the caption, "Does it play in Peoria?" but once we finished lunch we really just wanted to get back on the road and drive to Alton. We arrived in Alton just before sunset.

The memorial is in the cemetery.

Both of these guys are named Elijah Parish Lovejoy.

The monument is rather impressive with its trumpeting angel and the two eagles, and the lion supported urns. One wonders exactly why a town that went into a rage and killed a man, dumping him in an unmarked grave and leaving him there for years, would then dig him up and build him this rather elaborate monument.

It's a weird thing to have your family name carved in marble on a big construction like this. I wonder what Eli thinks about it?

The youngest Elijah Parish Lovejoy standing in front of an image of the oldest.

If You're Ever In Dearborn, Michigan

The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn Michigan is really very interesting. We made the final call to go to it because they were showing a special display of artifacts from the Titanic. It turned out that the tickets for that exhibit were all sold out, so we didn't get to see them. The rest of the museum turned out to be very entertaining, and it seemed to culminate a lot of the industrial historical experiences we have had on our journey.

Here we are nearing the end of our journey, right where we were when we started, staring at old trains.

Izzy and Hannah were the engineers.

These stage coaches strung together are the third oldest train ever run in the country.

Hannah and Izzy were stoked to be able to make really loud noises on purpose in public. The buttons make train sounds.

This car was the second to cross the United States.

It's route was basically our planned journey home.

The kids have grown to love the computer displays in museums.

An early tent trailer, it hasn't really changed that much, looks a lot like ours.

There was a whole section of the auto history devoted to car camping and road trips just like the one we are on.

This one is for all my VW bus friends. You know who you are.

I wondered how much of our current journey was due to the artifacts suggested in this display.

Cool! The alternative engine section... in a Ford Museum!

Electric car history

Can you tell which electric car was designed in the 80s?

They had a whole pretend mechanic shop.

The kids got to pretend to work on a car.

Well, the kids and dad really.

This is a display of the history of the family car, ending with a minivan.

Low-ri-der

Yeah, I'm just a sucker for a beautiful car.

They have a real working Diner inside the museum.

We stopped and ate and sat on the spinney stools. The interior of this place is really beautiful.

The museum had an endless array of gadgets, industrial widgets, airplanes, and engine type things.

It also had a whole design section, including a history of furniture design.

Then I found this and was pretty much astounded. The museum has a whole history of American lifestyles section, and included in it was this hippie geodesic dome.

The dome had a window open and was playing Grateful Dead and Van Morrison inside.

Not far from the Dome is another version of Buckminster Fuller's vision, with more of the modern touches.

Something about the two versions of Fuller structures made me think long and hard about our house on Paradise Road and the fantasy of modular yet individual structures set up in the woods that seemed to lead to Elijah and I living on a mountain side for seven years. This will not be the end of that discussion.

Among all the other vehicles was this weiner mobile, which Izzy was fascinated by. He couldn't believe it was a real thing.

So we fed him a hot dog and tried to explain commercials to him.