Still Going Across Kansas

I thought that once I got home and had reliable internet access getting this blog updated would be easy. Little did I know that life at home would get in the way.

Enough of the excuses on with the newest post. We are heading east and our next stop will be in Halstead, Kansas and I am sure most people would not make this town a destination but we sometimes have to go where we can get a space to park the RV. Once we got set up it didn’t take long to get interested in the local attractions. Some of them are huge and others are not so big yet we found them interesting.

The first place we went to see was so far out in the boondocks we thought we had missed it! The sign below introduces Mushroom Rock State Park. The explanation of how it was created is vaguer. Strewn around this small park are unusual rock formations some of which look like mushrooms. How these really soft rock formations survived is beyond me. The stone they are made of is so soft that it can be carved rather easily so it will only be a matter of time before they erode away.

Our next adventure was an amazing adventure about 650 feet below the surface in an extremely large salt mine called Strataca. This salt mine tour was in abandoned tunnels of a still active salt mine. The temperature is a consistent 58 to 60 degrees and the humidity is very low. The deposit of salt is estimated to be 400 feet thick and somewhere between 150 and 200 miles long containing approximately 30 trillion tons of salt. Although the salt is better than 95% pure it is still not suitable for human consumption. Almost all of the salt produced here is used as ice melting salt on highways!

The abandoned tunnels are now being used as underground storage. The constant temperature and controlled humidity create a condition that preserves items. Almost all of the old movies from Hollywood are stored here as well as document from the past.

Our next stop took us out of this world! Who would have ever thought that there was an outstanding museum covering the space race between the USA and the USSR and just like the salt mine the enormity of this display did not photograph well. In addition to the space race the museum also had a planetarium show, an IMAX movie and a live demonstration by a “Science Professor”.

Just a piece of history; When I got out of the Navy way back when my first job was at Spitz Labs in Yorklyn, Delaware. This company is one of the oldest planetarium builders in the world and to my amazement as I came around a corner there was a very old Spitz Planetarium projector on display. I have to admit that although I did not work on the model on display it brought back fond memories.

We toured the area and found so much rural Americana. This region has a very large Amish community and unlike the Amish in other areas of the country they did not use horse and buggies for transportation. Because the distances are so great between towns and farms they have been given permission to use tractors for transportation. Imagine my thoughts when I saw an Amish lady come out of the super market and place here bags on the back of a fairly new tractor and take off on her way home. Of course, with this being an Amish community we had no trouble in finding great bakeries, butcher shops and produce stands.

Since Kansas is known as the Sunflower State one might expect to see fields of them everywhere but that was not so for the area we were in. Any sunflower field we saw was already ripe and drooping so we never did get to see any sunflowers. In our search we did get to see some pretty good sunsets!

While we were in the area the weather north of where we were was much worse and to our amazement the main road into and out of our campground flooded so badly, we had to use a secondary entrance. Although we didn’t have any rain it was almost a week before the water level went down enough to use it.

Our next destination is St. Louis hopefully I will get to the post soon.