The Oklahoma City Memorial

After the Oklahoma City bombing, a group of needleworkers and quilters from rec.crafts.textiles.needlework and r.c.t.quilting created stitched squares and quilt blocks for the Internet Memorial Quilt for Oklahoma City.  The squares and blocks were sashed by a few quilters.  A sheep from Wisconsin named cutie pie donated wool that was spun into yarn used to tie the quilt.  The tieing was done in West Virginia.  Richard and I were living in Ohio at that time.  We picked up the quilt in WV and took it to OKC.  We showed it off at a guild meeting, I can't remember if it was ASG or EGA or just a local guild.  There were a few of the participants who came to OKC as well.

The next day, we presented the quilt to the city council.  It was very well received, and some of the council members talked about their grandmothers quilting and how quilts are part of American history.  After the presentation, we exited the chambers with our internet friends.  Luckily, one of them was a lawyer and used to speaking in public, because she was mobbed by TV cameras.  There was a short piece on the news that night.

I was in OKC for an ISMI meeting a couple of years ago.  I checked the OKC memorial website, and the quilt had just been taken off display in the museum, but was available for viewing in the archives, with advanced notice.  I didn't have time (or a car) to visit the memorial that day.  We spent Saturday night in OKC and visited the site before driving home Sunday.  The museum was closed, but we walked the grounds.  Such a moving experience, the chairs memorial is quite a sight.

There are nine rows of chairs, one for each floor of the Murrah building.  The second floor housed the day care, and there are lots of little chairs on the second row.

The flag was at half-mast in mourning for the victims of the movie house shooting.

There are walls on either end of the reflecting pool, called the Gates of Time, with 9:01 and 9:03 etched on them.  The bombing happened at 9:02.

Part of the building was left.

When we were at the site, a chain link fence surrounded the torn building.  They have kept part of the fence up, and people are still attaching items, pictures of their lost loved ones, and letters to the fence.

The Best Part of the Trip, The Best Part...

Meeting goals is so awesome...

Close Encounter at Devils Tower

This stop was one of the two highlights of the trip, for me.

We found 5 caches in the area, upping our Wyoming total.

 There is a similar formation at Double Head, in Queensland.  We've found a cache there.  We've also found a cache near a lava flow in the Canadian Rockies that made these columns.  But that was a flow, not a plug.  There's a feature in Yellowstone as well.

The last big rockfall was over 100 years ago.  We were glad there wasn't a rockfall today - there were climbers on the rock.

It was pretty hot.  Not too bad in Wyoming, maybe mid-90's.  But the car said 109 in the SD plains on the way home, and even through NE and KS it was 106.  This walk, though, had a nice (warm) breeze that felt good.  The trail is loaded with benches and convenient rocks to rest and enjoy the scenery.

Our close encounter was hearing a rattle and the squeak of a chipmunk as he became lunch for the rattler.

And prairie dogs!

Wind Cave

Wind Cave was found in the late 1800's by a couple of boys who were riding along and noticed the plants moving in front of a hole in the ground.  One of them put his hat by the hole and it blew away!  He came back later, put his hat in front of the hole again, and it was sucked into the cave, never to be seen again.  This hole is still the only natural entrance they've ever found.  And they've mapped out 138 miles of cave.

We descended 300 stairs.  These stairs and concrete walkways were constructed by the CCC in the 1930's and 1940's.  They took the concrete down in cut up inner tubes.  The inner tube held enough concrete to make 1/3 of a stair step.  That's a lot of trips!

We saw cave features like popcorn:

and boxwork, named because it looks like post office boxes:

Wind Cave has over 95% of the world's known boxwork formations.

It was 53 degrees in the cave, so we bought some long sleeve shirts.  I certainly didn't need one, as the humidity was over 90% and the coolth felt good!

Mt Rushmore

I used to think that if you've seen pictures of Mt. Rushmore, then you know what it looks like and there's no reason to go.  But we are here, so we might as well go.  I was wrong, it's pretty cool! 

See the rock just to the left of Washington's head?  That was supposed to be Jefferson's place, but the rock there was thin, so they blew up the work done so far and stuck Jefferson in between Washington and Roosevelt.  Doesn't it look like it now that you know the story?

The other thing I learned was that each president represents a different part of the US history from founding to union to the 20th century.

And they have ice cream!

We saw Rushmore from lots of different locations in the Black Hills.  From the pigtail bridges, which were just too cool in their own right.

From the highway to Wind Cave, I'll write about that tomorrow.

Go presidents!!

Toobin'

We've rented a house near Lead, SD.  Lead is a mining town, and you'd think it would be pronounced Led, but it's not, it's pronounced Leed.  The house is on a slip of land with Spearfish Creek on three sides.  The boys have been enjoying toobing in the cold, cold creek.

The creek moves pretty quickly!  There are big rocks and white water in the creek.  I estimate that they travel about a tenth of a mile from start to finish.  It's a nice run.  It could be longer, but they don't want to go over the waterfalls and under the bridge.

Honestly, I can't blame them.  The water is crystal clear.  There are brown trout that are smarter than your average kid (or husband).  Richard is teaching Andrew how to fly fish.

There is a new family next door.  They are from Dripping Springs, maybe 10 miles from our house.  They have a boy Andrew's age, a girl Connor's age, and a younger boy too.  They were tumbling on the lawn until full dark this evening, and will be fishing and toobing when we get back from Devils Tower tomorrow.

Carhenge!

Someone took old cars, buried them, painted them, and it looks like Stonehenge.  And there's lots more iron art too.



It was pretty hot in Nebraska, in fact, it's been pretty hot this whole trip.  Over 100 each day in the afternoons.  The mornings have been nice, in the upper 70s, but it gets hot pretty quick.  The land is flat and not too many trees to break up the hot wind.

Counting the Y holes and Z holes!

There are sunflowers!

And dinosaurs!

And when the wind blows, it gets pretty noisy!

There's a cache in the gas tank, but we couldn't retrieve it.  We signed the log on a car instead, as directed by the cache instructions.

Strolling around the Carisbury plain.

Caching Milestones through Kansas

We found our first Kansas cache this morning, just outside the hotel in a live oak tree. 

We found our second Kansas cache at the world's largest ball of twine.

It's really big!  It certainly smells like twine, and looks like twine, and feels like twine.

We hadn't planned on another one before the oldest active cache, but it turns out the geodetic center of the United States is about 14 miles away from the giant ball of twine.  There are two caches there.

We found Mingo!!!  This one is the oldest active cache.

We skipped the 6th oldest active cache (or 7th?) because it was just too hot.  Red's thermometer said 104 at one point, and it was 100+ for all of the afternoon.  We drove through more corn than I ever had imagined.  Corn and beans and wheat were the main crops. The sky was a nice blue with hardly any clouds.  We were on US-24 and 83 today.  We crossed US-183, which was cool, since we live just a couple of miles from it.  We found its other friend US-283 as well.  Nice to see the family all close together-like.

We found our first Nebraska cache just as we crossed the state line.  Tonight, we're in North Platte, NE.  We never saw South Platte or plain old Platte.

The Great Summer Road Trip 2012

We're off north again. We left this morning and are going to drive north until Thursday, then turn around and drive home. Along the way we hope to see:
* the largest ball of twine
* the oldest active geocache
* the 6th oldest active cache
* carhenge!
* the Black Hills
* Mt. Rushmore
* Wind Cave and Jewel Cave National Parks
* Devils Tower (da dum dum duum duuuuummmmmmmm)
* caches in our four remaining states, except Hawaii: KS, NE, SD, and ND
* caches in SK and MB

We made it to Wichita today and there's a cache 280 feet away! It will have to wait until tomorrow, though, the kids are asleep.