This morning we visited Churchill Downs, home of the Kentucky Derby:

We toured the Kentucky Derby Museum:

Museum admission included a walking tour of Churchill Downs:

The museum showed a film about the Derby on a 360 degree wrap-around screen:

Former race horses are buried here.  Well, not the entire horse.  When horses are buried, only the head, heart, and hooves are buried:

We visited with Transpired, who ran in the 2011 Kentucky Derby:

Fun in the gift shop:

The museum was interesting, we learned a lot about horse racing!

We continued north and crossed into Ohio at Cincinnati:

We worked our way into a surprisingly urban area to visit William Howard Taft National Historic Site:

The site preserves president Taft’s childhood home:

Like other presidential homes we’ve visited on this trip (Truman and Grant), the focus of the site is a tour of the home.  Since we did not go on the tour, all we got out of our visit was a few displays in the room where tour tickets are sold.

Trish has finished the doily she has been crocheting for the past few days:

We continued on to overnight at the Cabella’s of Centerville, Ohio.  We did a bit of browsing in the store:

See the alternating light blue line on the trip map for today’s drive.

This morning we drove north, crossing briefly into and out of Tennessee back into Kentucky:

Our first stop was Mammoth Cave National Park, the longest in the world.  The cave’s subterranean passages are shown on the map in yellow:

The visitor center was more crowded than usual with post-eclipse traffic.  After touring the visitor center, we descended into the cave:

Unlike caves we’ve visited in the past, like Carlsbad Cavern, Mammoth Cave is a dry cave, so there aren’t many Stalactites or other cave features here:

When the cave was first discovered, it was mined for saltpeter.  Some evidence of the mining remains:

The kids also handed in the Eclipse Explorer books we picked up at another NPS site last week:

Our next stop was Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park.  The primary feature of the park is this building, built in 1911, in which the childhood cabin of Abraham Lincoln is housed:

…Except it’s not really Abraham Lincoln’s house.  This cabin was built from logs that made up a tourist cabin claimed to be made from logs from a cabin found on the site that used to house Lincoln’s cabin.  Recently, tree ring analysis has shown that the logs are from trees younger than Lincoln, and therefore could not have been from his cabin.  Nonetheless, it’s the thought that counts, I suppose:

The memorial building:

We continued north to overnight at the Walmart of Shepherdsville, Kentucky.  See the alternating light blue line on the trip map for today’s drive.

On Shabbos day, after a nice davening, the shul had lunch together in honor of the one-year anniversary of a member couple. Shabbos in Leawood reminded me of how strong and special small out-of-town communities can be. After Shabbos, our RV neighbors from Brooklyn decided to drive over to a local Walmart and sleep there just to have the experience.

Today we left Leawood and continued East, crossing into Missouri. In the morning we visited Harry Truman National Historic Site in Independence, Missouri.  We parked a few blocks away and walked over.  Interesting street names:

We learned about America’s 33^rd president, who fought his own State Department to have the US vote for recognition of the fledgling State of Israel in the United Nations.  Trish posed with the president:

Our next stop was SubTropolis, a business complex built into a spent out limestone mine.  Unfortunately, access is closed on the weekends:

Our next stop was the town of Liberty, Missouri:

At this bank in 1866, Jesse James and his gang committed the first daylight bank robbery in US history.  We came here because a relative of mine was shot and killed during that robbery:

The museum was closed, but we were able to peek through the window:

We continued east to visit Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site in St. Louis, Missouri.  The visitor center:

I found this quote amusing considering that, that as a Civil War General, Grant issued General Order 11 which expelled all Jews from portions of Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee. The order was revoked by President Lincoln three weeks later.

The Grant home:

We had been watching weather forecasts throughout the day, and with only 18 hours to go until the eclipse, it looked like the St. Louis area had a good chance of cloudy weather, so we decided towards sunset to reposition to the Kentucky-Tennessee border, where the forecast looked much more promising.  We saw the St. Louis arch in the distance as we continued east:

250 miles later, we arrived in Oak Grove, Kentucky towards midnight and overnighted, naturally, at the Walmart here:

See the alternating light blue line on the trip map for today’s drive.

The end of the world?  No, just a passing front here at Lyon Lake in Kansas:

We drove east to Topeka, where we visited Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site:

The visitor center is housed in a Topeka school that was all-black before the court case forced the school district to desegregate:

These signs are not period-authentic, as the school was all-black, then desegregated:

Some rooms were restored to their original appearance:

Other rooms now house exhibits:

We continued east to Kansas City.  We had made arrangements to park at a synaogue for Shabbos in Kansas City’s Overland Park suburb, but it turned out that it had no exterior power outlets. With the forecast calling for humid conditions with temperatures in the low 90s, experiencing Shabbos in our RV under the relentless Kansas sun without air conditioning was unlikely to be enjoyable, so we made some last minute calls and were invited by Rabbi Mendy Wineberg to join his congregation for Shabbos at the Chabad of Leawood. Leawood is an outer suburb of Kansas City, and the Chabad of Leawood is the only synagogue that serves this area.

Also attending as guests were a family from Baltimore and a family from Brooklyn who were also in town to view this summer’s eclipse, which is now only two days away. The family from Brooklyn rented an RV in Kansas City and parked it right in front of the synagogue so they could carry their baby back and forth into the synagogue.

See the alternating light blue line on the trip map for today’s drive.

We woke up to a sunny day in the city park here in La Crosse, Kansas:

I called the police last night to confirm that we were in the correct spot and that it was legal.  I love how laid back rural America is:

We discovered that we parked next to a cluster of museums, all on the same property:

 
We first visited the Barbed Wire Museum:

Barbed wire art:

This museum is surprisingly extensive:

Each variant of barbed wire in the collection is labeled with its patent number:

This wire was used in 1892 in Bodie, California to move power from a hydroelectric plant to the town.  It was the first attempt in history to transport power from the source to a distant destination.  It was thought at the time that electricity flowed like water, and if the wires did not travel in a straight line, the electricity would “spill out”.  The project was a success, and power flowed 12 miles to town, though the perfectly straight path of the power poles was unnecessary:

This nest was built by ravens out of strands of barbed wire.  It weights over 70 pounds:

A setup like this, a modified coffee grinder and grinding wheel, was used to create the first strand of barbed wire:

A fence stretcher:

Fence posts:

The barbed wire hall of fame, which honors barbed wire collectors:

Our next stop was the Rush Country historical museum:

Our third stop was the post rock museum:

Trees were scarce in the plains states, so fence posts were made out of limestone:

Our next stop was the bank musuem, in the closed bank building moved here from Nekoma, Kansas:

The last museum here was a one-room schoolhouse, also moved here from Nekoma:
 

We continued east to Fort Larned National Historic Site:

The fort was built in the mid-1800s to protect traffic along the Santa Fe Trail from hostile Native Americans:

The visitor center was interesting:

This photo shows William Bent, one of the brothers who built Bent’s Old Fort, which we visited yesterday:

Our last stop of the day was Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve:

The preserve protects and interprets the largest remnant of tallgrass prairie in America, which once covered over 170 million acres:

The preserve also protects a historic farm.  We visited with the horse:

We continued east to overnight at Lyon Lake, which allows free lakeside camping:

See the alternating light blue line on the trip map for today’s drive.