Joplin, Missouri Recovery

On May 22, a huge tornado ripped through Joplin, MO.   Most tornados are quite localized, many times only a couple of hundred feet across, and a few hundred feet along a path. The Joplin tornado was as wide as a mile in places, and cut a swath across the town for almost three miles. Winds of a EF5 scale of greater than 200 mph and peaking at 250 mph, simply obliterated houses, businesses, autos, public buildings and, unfortunately, 162 lives.

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We've seen some tornado damage in earlier travels, but since we were near, we wanted to see what Joplin looked like five months after the event. (Another reason was that the "Extreme Makeover" TV series was just finishing a "seven-homes-in-seven-days" project a couple of days before our visit, and we wanted to see for ourselves what the local TV stations had been showing us snippets of all week long. The full show will be aired in January)

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What we saw was a lot of empty space with only foundations showing and a lot of debris piled here and there, but also many new structures being built, and several major restorations of viable structures.

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The major "hits" in town were three hospitals simply torn apart --- the building shells are there, but gutted by the fierce winds that blew out windows, doors, walls plumbing and furnishings. The biggest, St John's Hospital, is structurally unsound and is being torn down.  They will rebuild in a different location. We did not see (or could not recognize) the other two hospitals. 

You can see right through the hospital.

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Two schools were completely destroyed, and still stand as the tornado left them. We did not find temporary or permanent replacement structures.

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The replacement Wal-Mart and Home Depot stores were nearly complete, both moved from their previous locations where only the parking lots could be seen.  Home Depot set up an auxilliary tent for renting equipment.

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Even cars that had not been tossed around were literally beat apart by debris blown against them.  Most have been hauled to the scrap yards.  This is a picture from the day after the tornado.

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One of the oddities that occurred was that all the street signs were blown away. As a necessary temporary assist, the street names were painted on the pavement at each intersection.

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In the "ground zero" area, all the utility poles were also destroyed; new ones now stand alone in the devastation.

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And thousands of homeowners trudge onward in an effort to restore some semblance of normalcy to their homes and lives.  We were amazed at how much the people of Joplin and the volunteers have cleaned up as there were millions and millions of pieces of homes scattered everywhere.

and each street had a couple stars at each corner,

many with hopeful messages

Joplin has come a long way.  There is much left to do.

There are some mighty peculiar place names in Missouri

Every state has their own odd ball names.  Missouri fits right in with their peculiar names!

Would any of the 63 souls in the town of Tightwad even consider trying to get a loan from this bank?

And only Missouri has a town named Laurie. 

We've never seen a post office in a garage like this!  Just in Laurie, MO

And we went past the SHOW ME ACRES NUDIST RESORT in Stover yesterday.  Doesn't that just add another dimension to Missouri's state motto as the Show Me state?

When you care enough!

When you care enough....
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    You tour the Hallmark Visitor Center in Kansas City, MO. 

What nice people and a very pleasant stop.  We learned about how Hallmark got started and how it as grown in its 101 years.  The Hall family descendants are still active in the management. 

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We learned that Hallmark owns Crayons.  We were amazed at how many Hallmark movies have been made.  Just seeing little snippets of a few there kind of made you sniff!

We watched a die-maker with the very labor intensive task of creating a cut out for non-square card designs. 

We got a great education by a press-man who explained to us the steel bars that create little divots to roll mylar onto the cards to add the sparkle.  And he showed us a press that cut out shapes after the die-maker is done.  Of course, he had to give Dean the airplane!

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We didn't know that their most famous card is the Mother's Day pansy card introduced in 1939.  Has been printed ever since and has sold over 30 million! 

Last year, the post office introduced the pansy stamp to their Love collectible stamps.

Most surprising of all at the visitor center was that there was no gift shop to let us buy a few!

Independence, Missouri

With everything we have read of the pioneers starting out on the Oregon Trail, they all stopped and got provisions in Independence, Missouri.  The California, Mormon, Oregon, and Santa Fe trails all used Independence as a provision point.  We expected Independence to play up that connection.  Not so. The town seems to have forgotten that period of time.  We did find the National Frontier Trails Museum - a mostly tired and quiet museum. 

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But we did learn a couple of new things:

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We learned that the Santa Fe trail was the first (1821) and was a commerce trail between the states and Mexico similar to all the semi-trucks that run the interstates today. 

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At the estate across the street there were wagon ruts (swales) on their grounds.  It confounded us that they would leave lumps in their grounds for 190 years.  But it is a nice story.

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And there was a nice display on Ezra Meeker and his campaign to memorialize the Oregon Trail.  Especially his trek to Washington, DC, via New York City by covered wagon when he was 76.

Give 'em hell, Harry

Bremerton's claim to fame was slandered in the visitor center of Harry S. Truman National Historic Site!

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Though Bremerton has a plaque on the corner of the old Elks building where Truman spoke in 1948, and two people in town say they were the ones who first yelled out "Give 'em hell, Harry", the ranger on duty said that isn't how it happened.  And, in fact, had been used earlier on the road trip Truman was making. 

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Ah, well, we weren't there so what can we say. 

Kansas City Foreign Trade Zone

Foreign-Trade Zones are funny things to learn about.  And we still don't know much about them but Kansas City has one.  A foreign-trade zone is a defined area in a port of entry where commercial merchandise is handled outside of customs and stored duty-free.  We have figured out that a port of entry does not have to be a seaport but can be an airport.

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What is fascinating to us is that the storage area for the Kansas City foreign-trade zone is in a limestone cave.  Doing more research: we find that that is just one of many businesses in the underground caves. 

Kansas City has 12 underground industrial parks including the world's largest complex called SubTropolis. Nearly 50 local and international companies are doing business there where there is over 4.5 million square feet of developed space, 4.5 miles of paved, two-lane roads, 2.1 miles of rail spurs, 350 truck docks, and 1,500 parking spaces and it covers more area than the city's downtown business district. 

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We find that there is over 20 million square feet of caves underground in Kansas City.  And 6 million more cubic feet of limestone is mined out each year.  Lots more room for development! 

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Because it costs much less to build and run businesses underground, it is referred to as the Kansas City bargain basement.  Ho ho!

Are you one of the 93,000,000 descendants?

The Homestead National Monument in Beatrice, Nebraska estimates that there are 93,000,000 descendants of homesteaders in the world today.  We aren't.  Are you?

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This National Monument gives a detailed view to the many sides of the Homestead Act of 1862 signed by President Abraham Lincoln.

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The Homestead Act gave 640 acres (1/4 mile square – 1/4 section) to each person who could build a place to live and grow crops for 5 years.  Homestead National Monument is on the property of Daniel Freeman who was the first person to sign up for land at midnight on January 1st, 1863.  There was also an interview with the last homesteader in Alaska in 1986.  What he did and how he lived.  This had special meaning to be able to relate to a modern day homesteader.

The holes in each state show how much of the state was homesteaded.

What we learned:

> Only 40% of the homesteads were "proven" (lived and worked for 5 years) – the rest of the homesteads were abandoned.  There were some awful years with locusts and droughts.  It took a lot of grit to make it.

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> Homesteads in a few states: California > 107,000 households; Montana > 151,000, Oregon > 62,000, Washington > 58,000, Florida > 28,000, Nevada > 4000.

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> The travelers on the Oregon Trail had bypassed "Indian Territory" for the Oregon Territory – the Homestead Act opened all the Indian Territory for homesteading regardless of treaties.

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> 30 of the 50 states had lands open for homesteading from 1850 until 1976 and Alaska until 1986. Texas, Hawaii, and much of the eastern seaboard were not open for homesteading.

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> The displays showed how farm machinery became better and more mechanized.  And prairie life got easier and easier

We had to wonder about the government in DC who decided that a person must grow crops on the 1/4 section when in the arid western deserts this area was too small to support a settler family.

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The monument bragged that they had restored 100 acres of tallgrass prairie.  Tallgrass prairies as had been described to us were over 6' tall.  None of the plants in the monument's prairie were close to that.  I was hoping to be able to see the grass as had been described in the Willa Cather books written in the early 1900's.  Also sod homes were not built by the emigrants in this area but out west in the more arid desert.  Beatrice, Nebraska has enough wood to build homes.

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The monument set aside nearly 1/3 of their displays and their informational movie to the plight of the Native Americans who lost their lands to homesteaders.  We feel that the Homestead Monument was not the appropriate place to get into this and that another national area should be set aside to describe the serious consequences of the Manifest Destiny.

The Canyons of South Nebraska

Every place we travel is different and we got a kick out of crossing 6 Nebraska canyons today.

 

At home, we call these "canyons" CULVERTS!!

No blizzards in Wyoming this week

While traveling across Wyoming on I-80, we saw a lot of signs warning about high winds and blizzard conditions.  Before every pass there were gates to close and turn traffic back.  All the way across the state we've been at over 6000' and some of the passes were over 7500'.  Definitely this could be a major problem area if driving in wet, cold, and or windy conditions especially in the fall and winter.  And look at these snow fences.  Major blizzards can be expected!

 Our passage this time was beautiful.  Sunny and calm.           

Harvest Time

We are spending a lot of time traveling through the farm areas of Washington, Oregon and Idaho.  We thought that by mid-October all harvesting should be complete and the soil ready to rest during the winter.  Not quite yet.

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We saw trucks full of apple crates in Eastern Washington, followed by truck trailers with white onions in Oregon.  In Idaho we expected to see truck loads of potatoes.  Instead as we've traveled the Snake River Plain, we've seen trucks of yellow onions and many more trucks of sugar beets.  Many many beets.

  The Amalgamated Sugar Company processes the beets in the town of Paul nearby.

Greetings from Brazil

I guess we're getting old and kinda miss out on things now and then.  Somehow, as we rolled along, we must have lost track of time or direction, for we now seem to be in Montes Claros, Brazil.  Seems odd, but it must be true, as Laurie's credit card bills show a number of purchases there.  First a couple of gas purchases; then a couple of department store buys; and even a medical bill payment.  We must be getting old!   Maybe we're not safe to be on the streets without a keeper.

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OK, probably not the case at all.  But somewhere in the last week or so, somebody got Laurie's card number and transmitted it to some other not-so-nice person in Montes Claros.  And the purchases were well thought out, too.  The gas purchases were small. $13 and $17.  Since that worked, the department store purchases the next day were larger, $23 and $37.  Perhaps looking for the card limit????  The next ones, another day later, were $130 and $250.

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Laurie just happened to check her account online on Saturday, the day after the second purchases, and alerted the card company, who cancelled the card and started a fraud investigation.  Alas, the fraud department does not work on Saturday or Sunday, so nothing has progressed, except that the last two (bigger) charges now show up on Saturday.  We're assured the investigation will proceed, and all of the charges, and the associated foreign currency surcharges will be removed from any billing to us. 

And by Googling Montes Claros, we find some pleasant sights.  Maybe we ought to get that on our itinerary some year.  Or not.

Toppenish - another town of murals

It's been a long time since we've visited Toppenish.  There have been a lot of changes.   Though we couldn't find out how many murals have been added since our last visit, we know that 73 is a big number.  The city father's have a great idea and have followed through even in this tough economy.  And, yes, though we saw a lot of traffic traveling through downtown, many storefronts are vacant.  Too bad. 

Of course, if there is a reason to stop, there must be a geocache to look for.  We only found one today.  See the red circle?  We wonder: what is a dryer vent doing on the side of a commercial building?  Good reason to wonder!  Yep, there was a geocache jar hidden inside. 

The newer murals seems to have sharper colors.  Enjoy!

Crossroads to Market

- getting crops to market -

When Hops Were Picked By Hand

- early hop harvests were picked by Indians from all over the NW -

When A Permit Wasn't Required

- herding your cattle through downtown -

Horse to Horseless Carriage

Wintering Waterfowl

Western Hospitality

- ho ho -

And, of course, anybody who knows me knows I can't pass up a trip to the:

Just Strutting Our Stuff

A side stop today was meeting the "Strut Your Stuff" eBay guy in Yakima.  What a find! 

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Here is the person who has the gas struts we needed to replace all our old and tired gas struts that are used to keep cabinet and compartment doors open!  He has bought the stock of gas struts from many of the RV manufacturers as they have gone out of business and has a barn/garage 125' x 75' that is full of these things!

Fall Peeping - NW style

We have friends leaf peeping their way across New England. I am still looking forward to her perfect shot of brilliant red maples and a church steeple.  Like this Google image. 

But until we see that we will just have to enjoy our nice NW fall colors like we saw today as we crossed the Cascade Mountains.

And Here We Go

We got our act together, got the house and garage winterized, changed the oil and lubed the RV, and got everything packed aboard.  We were so far ahead of usual that we had time to wash and polish the RV and the C-RV.  Hooray for us!  ....  We got 1/2 mile down the road before a deluge hit.  And as we traveled through this,  we picked up road grime.  As Dean says, now we don't have to wonder when the rig is going to get dirty!