Missouri... Mizory... Mizery... Misery

I don’t know what kind of spell Missouri cast over us, but for some reason as hard as I think I cannot recall anything super interesting happening the first couple days that we were there. We woke up on the fifth of September with the intention of documenting what had already happened so far on our trip. You know, get the journals written, the photos compiled, the videos edited, and of course, the blogs written. But as you will all have noticed at this point, I only posted one blog that day, and that blog was as short as could be seeing as the subject matter was Kansas. As far as productivity was going for that day we were down near zero.

“Still something must have happened” you say, and to that I nod my head a bit and try my best to recall what we did with all the time that we had that day. Here is a real streamlined approach to it (because wasting words on doing nothing seems like such a lousy thing to do, of course I suppose that is exactly what I’m doing now, how many words have I shoved in this parenthetical statement already? Okay, maybe wasting words on nothing is more up my alleyway after all).

1.         Wake up and I make the morning oatmeal out on the front porch after Katt leaves for work. (Morning oatmeal is pretty much a sweeter rendition of evening beans, for this particular oatmeal I accidentally overloaded on the amount of molasses that I included, something that I have made sure to avoid since)
2.          Sit around and try to get some work done on social media outlets while trying to ignore the rising heat and humidity.
3.         Move around to the back side of the building to get some shade and snack on some food.
4.         Realize that we really are getting nothing done plus we can’t get access to the wifi at the back of the building so maybe we should go see if we can find the Missouri river.
5.         Wander aimlessly through town with a vague idea of the direction we should be going.
6.         Run into a random wall of trees in the middle of town and try and make our way through the brush eventually finding ourselves in a heavily wooded patch of land right in the middle of the city, eventually get out and back to the road.
7.         Decide to go back and get the cars and drive to the river.
8.         Get waylaid by stumbling across a whole bunch of Monarch Butterfly Chrysalises.
9.         Run into Katt when she gets home, find out we can check out the pool and community center there at the apartment complex
10.       Check out the pool and community center at the apartment complex
11.        Do a tiny bit of writing.
12.        Have a small little party to celebrate my birthday as we slip into September 6^th

Wow, that is quite a few words I wasted on nothing. And that was even with breaking it down to bullet points. Anyway, my birthday, September 6^th, came in with everyone waking up late and then once everyone was awake Katt treated us all to my birthday lunch. It was at a popular Kansas City chain restaurant called 54^th Street Pub and Eatery. The sandwiches there were beyond delicious, and the local beer I tried was delicious—very smooth, slight hint of fruit, and only a bit of bitterness on the finish. Once again, major shout-out to Katt for being the best hostess ever.

After hanging out for a bit longer we got in our cars and drove a few hundred miles to Jefferson City where we met up with Aaron, an old roommate of Tweedy’s and Eric’s (since I had hung around those two constantly I knew him as well). He offered us a floor to crash on in a room that had enough air conditioning to keep us at a decent temperature to fall asleep at—a rare thing to find in the state of misery… I mean Missouri. Our time at Aaron’s only extended through the night, then we were up and on the road again the next day on the search to find a cave.

Missouri is known for being the cave state and so we were hoping to find some cave that did not have any of the tourist walks in it, so that we could just go spelunking in it without anyone constantly staring over our shoulders, unfortunately that was not what ended up happening. We found Meramec Caverns on the map and so decided to head towards that cave since it also appeared to be near a state park. Our reasoning was even if Meramec Caverns was a tourist trap then at least we could wander through the state park and perhaps find a cave that was free of the irritating tour guides and regulations and planned routes through easily accessible segments of cave.

We reached the outskirts of Meramec and Eric and Tweedy had the keen desire to rinse off beforehand because they had been traveling through the land of endless humid heat in a car that had no air conditioning (personally I felt great, which will surprise my family since they all think my car has a horrible air conditioning system—turns out that all you have to do for it to work at 100% is fill the car with a whole bunch of stuff and drive through states with high humidity). So we stopped off at a river and swam around for a bit before going on to the cave entrance.

Meramec Caverns was indeed a tourist trap, and the price for a single adult was high above what we agreed to turn down ($15 had been our agreed maximum, the price was $23). We tried haggling with the tour guide behind the counter along with trying to figure out caves that we could go into without paying a fee. He mentioned a few places (actually he mentioned ten different locations, though didn’t include any directions to any of them) along with some encyclopedic type knowledge about the caves and types of caves in the state of Missouri. Though despite all of his knowledge we ended up skipping finding a cave to go spelunking in and instead headed on to a nearby state park called Elephant Rock.

To sum up Elephant Rock—it looks like a little bit of Colorado in the middle of Misery, I mean Missouri.

We hiked all over the rocks and even all the way to the opposite side of the park while we were in search of one of Jesse James’ hideouts that one of the people there told us about. He was going to give us very specific directions, but Tweedy didn’t want to hear them for some reason. Because of that we never found his old hideout, but we did find two old granite quarries that had since filled with water. If it hadn’t been sitting water we probably would have jumped in.

We stayed there until the sun dipped down below the horizon, even made some food at one of the park benches, and then we were on the road for Illinois.

For video check out these channels on YouTube: Eat2Pigs and itawtidid

Living Like a Husker

Kansas—due to being rather flat and uninteresting—took just a few hours, and rather late at night we ended up crossing into Nebraska.

Eric’s Great Uncle Harry had offered us a place to camp on his property, and so we were bent on getting all the way to Burwell, Nebraska that night. Get there we did at a little past midnight and set up a super spacious five-person tent. I have just a 3 or 4 person tent so it is nowhere near as luxurious, especially with three big dudes sleeping in it. We would all run into each other and end up accidentally spooning or something. Thank goodness that Tweedy found the five-person tent. My big ol’ memory foam pad gives me all the space I need and I sleep on that like a baby. Eric and Tweedy don’t have nearly as comfortable of sleeping pads as I do, but then they’re trying to keep all of their stuff in an even smaller vehicle.

So there were pulling up to Uncle Harry’s property at nearly 12:00 in the morning. It took a moment taking care of everything in the dark, but eventually we were all in the tent and passed clean out. I mean as far as non-athletic activities go, driving ranks pretty high up there for quotient of exhaustion to time spent doing the activity. I say this to try and legitimize the fact that we did not wake up until nearly 11:00 the next day, and we were woken up by Uncle Harry.

Uncle Harry will remain one of the legends of the trip and will be spoken of with a measure of reverence by all of us for years to come. This in no way means that he was a reverent individual, almost anything but (though he did have us come to church with him on Sunday morning). He was sarcastic as could be and loved spinning tales. Picture a nearly eighty-year-old man who has spent his life working the soil—sun worn, hands callused, and entire body still strong and wiry. This was the man that shouted into our tent to get up and quit being lazy. He made a very legitimate point that we were letting the day slip away. It took a moment to drag our groggy butts out of the tent, but then we got to have the grand tour of Uncle Harry’s property and chat with him about all of the ventures that he had a hand in throughout the years.

I think most people have heard of the Hydrogen Fuel Cell—the technology that could replace the gasoline combustion motor—well he had created conversion kits for combustion engines. They only would cost the consumer $2000 with installation and managed to improve the gas mileage of a Ford SUV to 100 miles per gallon. Unfortunately, this entire venture was shut down by the government, both by legal indictments and restriction of contracting and money flow. I’m not really one to believe in conspiracy theories, but I have been wondering why in the world I have not heard anything else about Hydrogen Fuel Cells after Honda did a test of a vehicle in Sacramento, CA and a city in Japan as well. It would all make sense if the oil companies that run the government just wanted the project shut down… just throwing that idea out there.

The crowning piece of Uncle Harry’s property was the river. We spent the greater majority of the day there by the water, and for good reason. Swimmable water is hard to find outdoors in the home state. In Colorado the water is always cold because it is only supplied by snowmelt and cold mountain springs. This river was warm, at least warm in comparison. So we waded through it and rinsed in it and just hung out in it for hours.

After that Uncle Harry took us out for lunch at a fun little cowboy bar in town. That little place had more character in it than any of the commercial bars I’ve ever been to. Plaques and pictures hung all over, including snippets from local newspapers. All of the paraphernalia served to remind the attendant that he or she was indeed in the country. The burgers that we had tasted delicious as well, of course that was the first thing we had eaten aside from beans, oats, or dried fruit. Back on the farm we helped the women set up for something called the Junk Jaunt that covers over 200 miles in Nebraska. This is an annual event where people from across the country visit different properties where antique pieces are sold that were collected during the previous year. Apparently it’s a pretty big thing. The property that we stayed on had a huge yard, 4 car garage, and a two story shed that was about 900 square feet and all of that ends up getting loaded with the antiques that will be sold to the people touring through.

Of course once that work was done there was one thing left to do. Go back to the river! And the river is where we remained until about midnight, cooking up a pot of the beans which are already becoming the favorite treat of the evening. I’m the chef on the trip, and I try to do the best I can to change up what goes into the mixture every evening. That particular night we had fresh vegetables from the garden, some bits of apple from the apple trees on the property, wild herb, and a dash of hot sauce. All of that was mixed into a base mixture that included baked beans, a can of chili, and some instant potatoes (those add salt and act as a thickening agent as well as a filler). Trust me, it tasted good. Good enough that I could not stop shoveling the mixture in until there was nothing at all left in the pan. Maybe it was just that I was hungry from playing in the water all day though. Or maybe it was an affect of all the smoke off of our little fire by the river.

The next day we woke up and broke down the tent. There was a moment of joining our hosts at the church they attended (a nice catholic church there in Burwell) before we went back to say thank you and goodbye before heading on for Lincoln, Nebraska. We were going there partially because Tweedy knew someone there and partially because, hey, it’s me. It really was just a stop off on the way into Kansas City. We arrived in Lincoln at the University of Nebraska at around seven o’ clock at night just to find out that Tweedy’s friend was not feeling good and so we had no one to see. With that being the case and the sun already on its way down we decided we would book it for Kansas City so that we could sleep inside that night.

Once again we crossed a state line when it was dark out.

The drive continued until about midnight when we met up with an old friend of Tweedy’s and Eric’s.

As far as chill and hospitable people go I’m pretty sure Katt would rank in the top 100 in the world. She let three guys roll into her place after midnight and set up camp in the living room of her apartment, not to mention that she made us some bomb tacos when we arrived. Once again it was the exhaustion of a long night of driving and we found ourselves crashing pretty hard just to wake up the next morning in our third state: Missouri.