A Long Weekend

Although we are not always allowed the luxury, we like to treat my long weekends like mini vacations. We like to get out of town, but not go so far that half of the three days are spend en route. This is difficult when you live in a city that is central to several others but not close to any of them. To further complicate the issue, we wanted to allow Kristy to go with us and she had to work Saturday evening. We were able to come up with a pretty good solution, I thought.

Saturday Harry and I went to Lindsborg, which is probably about an hour up I135 and has a strong Sweedish heritage. We visited some interesting shops and strolled the streets. At 1:00 the Burgher Sandzen art museum on the campus of Bethany College opened and we went through that. Although I cannot spell his name, he is one of my favorite artists and was teaching at Bethany at the same time my Uncle Loren was there.

I was somewhat disappointed in the food offerings in town. We ended up having pretty American stuff for lunch. I did, however, have an excellent piece of gooseberry pie. The crust was flakey like pie crust should be, and the filling was tart and tasted of gooseberries instead of just sugar.

After lunch we toured the old mill and the Heritage park. There is a building there that was built in Sweeden for the 1904 Worlds Fair in St. Louis. After the fair it was given to Bethany and was used as a classroom for many years.

We came back home and Sunday morning the three of us went to Topeka. Our first stop once we got there was the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Sight. This should be a must see for everyone, but especially for those who were born after the mid 1960's. I know a lot of younger people don't understand what the big deal is about race relations because they don't comprehend how things were from Reconstruction until 1965, especially in some of the South. Anyway, it is a really well done museum.

We got to swim in the afternoon and then got our search for fireworks pretty much flooded out by torrential rains.

Monday we went to the zoo. It is a nice one in a really pretty setting. One thing I like about going to zoos in different towns is that, no matter how large or small they are, each one seems to have something I haven't seen at any of the others. This one had a Palla Cat, one of the more unique and interesting cats I have seen. He was gray, and when he "spoke" his nose wrinkled up and the sound he made was like a combination of hissing, clicking, and meowing. He was quite vocal. They also had some younger ones in another area, but they were asleep.

We also visited the state capitol. What a lovely building! Too bad it is always full of Republicans. It really is impressive. I had not been there for years.

There were a lot of other things we could have done but we didn't want to put ourselves under a lot of pressure. Amazingly, we didn't do any shopping while we were in Topeka - didn't even go into the mall or any of the stores. Just were tourists.

My favorite 4th was when we went to Omaha; the worst was Tulsa. This one was somewhere in between, but closer to Omaha than Tulsa.