Monday morning it was time to check out of our bed and breakfast and leave Nauvoo. We headed south and then across the Mississippi at Hannibal back into Missouri. You may (or may not) remember that I mentioned in the first half of the report that there was one more birthday surprise coming up. Well to explain that, we have to back up a few weeks to when we were planning our trip. I was figuring out the route we would be taking across Missouri, and noticed that we would be going right past the town of Marceline, MO. Being the Disney fan that I am, I remembered that that was the town where Walt Disney spent some of his growing up years, and that he used as his model for Main Street when he decided to build Disneyland. I also seemed to remember that there was some sort of Disney museum there, so I went to Google, and, sure enough, found the Walt Disney Hometown Museum website. It looked like it would be a pretty fun place to visit, until I went to the page that listed their hours: Closed on Mondays! Arghhh! There was no way to change our plans to be there on a different day, so I had resigned myself to just driving through the town and seeing "Main Street," and the museum from outside. Now, back to a week ago Monday. A few hours before we got to Marceline I was getting tired, so Liz took over driving. As we drove into Marceline, we followed the signs to the museum, which is housed in the former train depot of the town. As we drove up outside the wrought iron gate, I said, "Hey, it looks like the door is open!" To which Liz replied, "Surprise, Happy Birthday!" She had called the museum and arranged for them to open just for us!
The museum is run entirely by volunteers, and the lady who came to meet us was really nice. It turns out she had hosted Walt Disney in her home when he came back to Marceline to help dedicate their park and pool. It was a pretty funny story. She said she and her husband had just moved to Marceline shortly after they married, and they had bought the newest house in town, but didn't have any money left to buy any nice furniture. About that time the city was planning a ceremony to dedicate the new park and pool and decided to invite Walt for the heck of it. They were surprised when he accepted the invitation. But they were worried that their hotel was too run down, so they didn't know where to have Walt stay. They came to our hostess and said, "You have the nicest house in town, we need to have Walt stay with you." She pointed out that she didn't have any nice furniture, to which they replied, "Don't worry, we'll move all your furniture out and we'll all move in our nicest stuff for the few days he will be here." So that's what they did. And our hostess and her husband remained good friends with Walt until he died. She told us he was a really nice, down to earth man. Anyway, the museum had a nice collection of stuff, including a bunch of letters that were donated by Walt's sister, Ruth. It was really fun, and a great birthday surprise.
From the museum we drove down main street to the park, and saw where at one point Walt had moved an early version of the Autopia track and cars from Disneyland to their park. Then we drove back to Walt's boyhood home, and saw his "tree of dreams" that he used to sit under and dream. They have also reconstructed a barn that was behind the house that he used to play in. Disney fans who have visited have written messages to Walt on the walls and beams inside the barn, so we added ours. The funnest one was a drawing of Jason Fox wearing Mickey ears that was done by Bill Amend, the artist who draws the Foxtrot comic strip.
We finally got back on the road heading west with our next stop being Jamesport, which is the largest Amish community in Missouri. The ladies had to do some shopping there, but thankfully didn't take too long. From there we headed northwest to Adam ondi Ahman. The church has markers there at either end of a gravel road that curves around to two different viewpoints of the valley, which is very beautiful. It's amazing to think that there was once a whole community here, but now it's just open farmland. It's also mind boggling to think what has happened there, and what will happen there in the future. Liz had printed out some quotes from Bruce McConkie's "Millennial Messiah" about those events to read while we sat there.
From there it was south to Far West. Another place where once 1500 cabins and homes stood, and now there is pretty much nothing. The church has enclosed the 4 temple cornerstones there in a nice wrought iron fence and has a nice stone monument with several quotes from the D&C on it. There's a Community of Christ church across the road from the temple site and a farmhouse here and there, but that's about it now. We had read that they had found the original cabin of Charles Rich in the area, and we succeeded in finding it. It turned out that the cabin and land around it is know owned by an older lady who we met at the site. She told us the story of how she and her husband had come across it a year or two ago and decided they wanted to buy the land and try to restore the cabin. After a series of events they did succeed in purchasing the property, but then her husband passed away some months ago, and now she is living in an RV there working on getting a home built and trying to get the cabin restored. She's out there in the middle of nowhere all by herself! She has a lot more faith than I do.
The sun was going down by now, so we headed on south to the outskirts of Kansas City where we had reservations to stay at the Worlds of Fun Village. Worlds of Fun is an amusement park that is conveniently located right between Liberty and Independence, and they have a little RV park with some cottages and cabins. We stayed in one of the cottages Monday and Tuesday nights. We hadn't had any TV in Nauvoo, so that night was the first time we got to see any of the Olympics. The cottage had a front room with a mini kitchen and a futon, a bathroom and a bedroom with a double bed and a bunk bed, so we were able to spread out a bit again.
Tuesday morning we slept in a little and then headed out for the Liberty Jail visitors center. The church has done a really nice job there, and we were given a tour, along with one other family, by a nice sister missionary who treated us to a verse of a hymn at the end of the presentation. After that I wanted to head out to Richmond to see some of the historic sites out there, but the rest of the family was more interested in going back and enjoying the swimming pool at the village, so I dropped them off back there and headed out on my own. I was able to see the statue of Alexander Doniphan, who helped the Saints in many ways when they were being driven around the state of Missouri. I also found both Richmond cemeteries. The first one is an older small one that the church actually maintains, and which is the final resting spot of Oliver Cowdery. The church has placed a monument to the three witnesses to the Book of Mormon where they believe he is buried. Most of the tombstones there were illegible, but there were a few Whitmers' whose names were visible. In the larger cemetery I found David Whitmer's tombstone.
On the way back to Kansas City I stopped in Excelsior Springs, which is supposed to be close to the site where Zion's Camp were saved by a big storm, to get some lunch at a little barbecue place that our guide book mentioned. It was very good, but not what I would call exceptional. I met back up with the family at the cottage, and then we headed over to the amusement park to take advantage of their afternoon special price.
Worlds of Fun is owned by the same company that owns Cedar Point amusement park in Ohio, which is known for having the most big roller coasters of any park. Worlds of Fun isn't in that league, but it had a few fun coasters. The first coaster we rode was not so fun. It was their only wooden coaster, the Timber Wolf, and it was one of the bounciest things we've ever been on. If you like driving on washboardy roads at 60 mph, you would like this roller coaster. Not so much fun. The second coaster we hit was their newest one, which is an inverted coaster called the Patriot. We enjoyed that one a lot, and went back to ride it a second time later on. Right next door was the Spinning Dragons coaster, which is like a tilt-a-whirl combined with a wild mouse coaster. Then we hit the Boomerang, which is a coaster that a lot of parks have versions of. Finally we made it over to the biggest coaster, the Mamba, which is a big hypercoaster with a 205 foot first drop. Now that was fun! Anna and I rode it a second time right away (in the next to last row, this time) and then we all came back and rode it one more time right before the park closed. Anna and I got the very back row that time, which was the best. After the park closed we headed back to the cottage and watched some more Olympics before hitting the sack.
Wednesday morning we headed out to see the sites in Independence. We started out heading downtown to get tickets to tour Harry Truman's house, and from there we followed the Missouri Mormon walking tour in our car to see several sites from church history around the downtown area. We interrupted that to go on our tour of Harry's house at the appointed hour. The park ranger that gave the tour did a good job, so it was an interesting, but brief tour. The park ranger convinced us that we should go see the Truman Presidential Library, so later that afternoon we made that our last stop before heading for the airport. After the tour we went and had lunch at Clinton's Soda Fountain, where Pres. Truman had his first job as a youngster.
After lunch we finished up the sites on the walking (er, driving) tour, and then went to the LDS visitor's center. Another really well done visitor's center. The upstairs focuses on church doctrines, and the downstairs is more about the church history in the area. They have some replicas of log cabins down there where they do the presentations about what it was like for church members in Missouri back in the 1800's. We had a sister missionary who was pretty new give us the tour, and she did a good job. After we left there we went over to the Community of Christ temple and spent some time in the museum they have there. There have some interesting artifacts from Joseph and Emma, so that was worthwhile. Then we stopped for a few minutes at the Church of the Temple Lot, and saw one of the cornerstones of the temple. Liz and I went into their little visitor's center for a few minutes and the gentlemen their explained to us the differences between their church and the Community of Christ and others, so that was interesting. As we drove from there we passed a church that had a sign that said it was the "Remnant Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints." I checked it out on Wikipedia and found out that it is one of quite a few branches that have broken off from the RLDS/Community of Christ church. Interesting.
As I mentioned before, our last stop before heading to the airport was the Truman Presidential Library. We got there around 4:00 and they close at 5:00 (we had to leave around then anyway to catch our flight), so we asked if they had a latecomers discount. They didn't, but she gave Erin and Anna student discounts (they're both getting ready to go back to school, so that was appropriate), and then she gave Liz and I senior citizen discounts! Well, my birthday was the previous Sunday, and Liz's was coming up in another week, but we're not quite that old. But hey, it was a discount. Our time was limited, but we still enjoyed the time we had there. It was interesting to see some of the debate still on-going about whether or not dropping the atomic bombs was really necessary. They presented several viewpoints on both sides of the argument. They also had a traveling exhibition about Pres. Lincoln on display, so we zipped through that as well.
After we left the library, we had one more mission to accomplish before arriving at the airport. We wanted to make a foray into Kansas just to say we had been there (we missed a chance to do the same into Iowa while we were in Nauvoo -- just forgot to do it). The route we initially planned to cut through Kansas on the way to the Kansas City airport (which is in the Missouri side of Kansas City) turned out to be a bad choice due to some major construction on an interstate, so we ended up going all the way around Kansas City on the belt route, but we still made it to the airport in plenty of time. We got to watch more of the Olympics on the way home (Frontier airlines has TV's at every seat), and they didn't even lose any of our luggage. Our friend, Kevin Sylvester, came to pick us up (at 11:30 pm -- thanks, Kevin!), and we found all more or less in order when we got home.
Well, it took a while to get this all done, but there you have it. A trip to remember our heritage, and our history. And what an amazing history it is!
1 comments:
What a trip!
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