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Published: January 13th 2008
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Obfuscator writes: When we woke up in the morning at whatever State Park we had found ourselves mired in (Ed. Note: Finger Lake State Park, as it turns out), we were again confronted with the minor debacle that had occurred under the cover of darkness. After 8:00, when we knew the park office opened, we waited around a bit to see if a kindly ranger would find us and take pity on us while doing rounds. We busted out the laptop and watched some Star Trek to kill a bit of time, but after an episode with no ranger in sight, we figured it was time to start the calls.
First we called the park office, hoping for a cheap and simple fix. A sure sign of the times, the main reason the park office refused help was that they couldn't take on the liability. They did at least give us the number of a tow truck in Columbia, which was only about 10 miles away. We watched another partial Star Trek episode before they arrived, and pulled us free of the earth's ichor.
After Onaxthiel paid them off, we rolled south to Jefferson City, anxious to do something
more interesting than look at mud for the day. It started raining shortly after we left the accursed camp ground, so we figured looking at a State Capitol, which is usually a mostly indoor affair, would be a good choice anyway. The Missouri State Capitol is large, with some imposing statuary on the outside. The design seemed a bit taller than many. On the inside it was equally impressive, with some very large hallways and rotundas to add to the awe inspiring effect. They also had lots of murals on their walls and ceilings, a bunch of which portrayed various early occupations of settlers and things in the state. Under each one, was painted the name of the occupation. Now, you may be aware that when words are carved into buildings and statues, they often change “u”s to “v”s, I suppose because it is much easier to carve them into stone. We were a bit surprised to find that the mural painters had carried this convention over into their medium. We really couldn't figure out a reason for it, but imagine our surprise when out of all of the paintings that conformed to this rule, we found one that didn't.
Clearly, a Kodak moment.
We were rather annoyed to find that both the House and the Senate, including their galleries, were locked. This was especially annoying since neither was actually in session, as far as we could tell. We lucked out in gaining access to the House gallery, finding one door that was perhaps forgotten, and were thus able to view some really beautiful stained glass windows. It was unfortunate that Missouri apparently holds open government in such low esteem, since they have quite the nice building for it. There's also a pretty good museum in the basement of the capitol with a cool exhibit on the State Penitentiary that apparently dominated the landscape of Jefferson City for quite a while.
We drove west and north from Jefferson City, toward Kansas City. Along the way, we stopped at the site of the Battle of Lexington (the Civil War one, of course). It wasn't a very big place, nor was it a particularly large battle, but it was an important one, as Lexington was an important river way, and a fairly significant Union force (by the standards of the western front anyway) suffered a major defeat. Mostly we learned
about it through the journal of a Confederate sympathizing woman, which of course told of the idyllic lives of the residents of the South. Still, the museum was a nice little one, and the lady running it gave us lots of free candy.
We cruised on in to Kansas City around rush hour, which was sort of poor. We were looking for a restaurant that was listed in one of our road tripping guide books, but we drove around the busy streets for some time, and couldn't seem to find it. Instead we stopped at a little local joint called Aladdin's Cafe, which had a wide variety of Mediterranean cuisine on the menu, and seemed to be run by a friendly Middle-Easterner, perhaps Jordanian. The food was excellent, and the prices reasonable. It was on 39th St, for anyone who finds themselves in Kansas City.
After dinner, we made contact with our cousin, who happens to be living in Wichita right now, and arranged to meet up with her in a couple of days. For this night, we drove a bit out of Kansas City and found a County Park with camping. It was a pretty cold night.
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Jesse4Ever
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Atchison
This is one of the trivia questions I was going to use for the President's quiz in February, but it is a bit too controversial as his term technically ended on the same day as Polk. I prefer to think, that for one Sunday, the United States had no President.