Czech Mate

 "Czech"mate: Another Kansas day trip has been successfully completed.

A trip last week took us to the Czech Capital of Kansas - Wilson - and to Lucas by way of Claflin. (Exploring Millers of Claflin furniture store is a whole other kind of trip, but that's another story.) 

You know the saying about kids' allowance burning a hole in their pocket? Randy has that kind of reaction when he hears about road trips. Ever since he heard about friends who took their grandsons to the Garden of Eden in Lucas in mid-July, he wanted to schedule a similar road trip. 

With a little cooler day in the forecast last Thursday, he convinced me.  

  

During the 1870s, a large migration of Bohemian and Moravian immigrants from Czechoslovakia settled in and around Wilson. Many Czech families still live in the area and carry on Czech traditions, including Czech food, art, dancing and music. The City of Wilson acknowledged its pride in its Czech heritage in 1967, when the State of Kansas declared Wilson the Czech Capital of Kansas. Czech eggs are traditionally painted or embellished eggs exchanged at holidays and celebrations. The painting of the egg is known as the art of kraslice in the Czech culture. 

The idea of creating the World’s Largest Czech Egg began in 2003. Hess Services Inc from Hays delivered the fiberglass egg in August of 2012. Volunteers sanded the egg in the summer of 2013, and the black base coat was painted by volunteers in the summer of 2014. The egg design was done by Christine Slechta, the Wilson School art  teacher, with students and volunteers doing the painting in the summer of 2015. The egg was dedicated in July 2016, 10 years ago. 

The design includes an eight-pointed star, which symbolizes birth and the belief that every person has their own star. The radiant sun means good fortune, and specific colors like red represent joy and health. 

The World’s Largest Hand-painted Czech Egg stands 20 feet high and 15 feet wide under a gazebo in the Ed and LaVange Shiroky Park in Wilson. There are smaller decorated eggs scattered around Wilson's downtown.  

I loved this sunflower egg. (We should have stopped and taken some other egg photos, but Randy's real destination was the Garden of Eden. Plus, it was getting warmer.)

And who knew there would be a "news peg" for this blog post? On Wednesday morning (08-11-26), I saw that Governor Laura Kelly had announced that the State of Kansas and the Czech Republic signed a Statement of Mutual Cooperation. The statement will allow for greater cooperation between Kansas and the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Industry and Trade related to trade, business development, technological research, and several other key areas. The governor's office said it will foster even stronger bilateral relations and create new avenues of cooperation among Czech and Kansan entrepreneurs, businesses, scientists, artists, universities, and other institutions. The Statement of Mutual Cooperation focuses on four key industries: aerospace; agriculture, animal health, and biotechnology; advanced manufacturing; and nanotechnologies.

And Wilson was mentioned in the press release: "The statement strengthens ties between the citizens of the Czech Republic and Kansas and supports Czech cultural heritage in the state. Kansas is home to several Czech businesses as well as the town of Wilson, the Czech Capital of Kansas and one of the largest Czech-American communities in the United States."

We ate lunch at Made From Scratch in Wilson. Both of us were planning to order bierocks, but they were sold out. I had a delicious Reuben sandwich on homemade rye bread with house-made sauerkraut. Randy finished his meal with rhubarb pie ala mode.

Then we were off to Lucas. Driving by Wilson Lake was a trip down memory lane for Randy, who used to take the kids there on camping trips. He pointed out the convenience store where he'd let the kids choose Oreos and other snack foods. When he was a teenager, there were also plenty of excursions to Wilson Lake with his family and neighbors. 

From the Lucas Chamber of Commerce web page

Lucas is known as the Grassroots Capital of Kansas. Grassroots art is defined as creative work made by self-taught individuals. Lucas has grassroots art from more than 20 artists. Lucas was named one of the 8 Wonders of Art by the Kansas Sampler Foundation. 

The movement in Lucas began way back in 1907, when Civil War Veteran Samuel Perry Dinsmoor began creating his cabin home and sculptures using concrete and native post rock at age 62. 

He constructed the home using limestone logs, some up to 21 feet long. Then, using 113 tons of cement, Dinsmoor built 40-foot tall "trees" to hold his larger-than-life figures for his sculpture garden. The sculptures reflect Dinsmoor's views about Populist politics, life and the Bible. 

Dinsmoor built a 40-foot tall limestone mausoleum for himself and his first wife. Visitors can actually "visit" Dimsmoor in his handmade glass-topped concrete coffin. Yes, it's bizarre. But then again, I supposed The Garden of Eden is bizarre, too.

The mausoleum is the pyramid-shaped building on the right.

Adjacent to the Garden of Eden is Roy and Clara Miller's rock park. 

It was created by the Millers originally "as an oasis for weary travelers" and was located on the west edge of town. The Millers traveled to 37 states, picking up interesting rocks, minerals, shells and artifacts. They incorporated their finds into a series of cone shaped towers. The park opened in 1921 with sculpture construction started in 1932. In 1969, the site was sold to settle the estate and sculptures moved to Hays. But in 2013, the sculptures came back to Lucas.

These aren't the only bizarre attractions in town. Because Lucas has more than 15,000 visitors a year exploring the grassroots art, the city needed public restrooms. So the Grassroots Art Center and other residents created a public restroom that's also an art attraction.

The building is shaped like a toilet tank, the benches in front represent the curved toilet seat and the entrance is like a raised toilet lid. The sidewalk spools out of a toilet paper sculpture.

Inside, almost every surface of  the bathrooms - except the toilet and the sinks themselves - are mosaic art. 

 

Inside the women's bathroom: 

 

 

And inside the men's bathroom:

Toilet Bowl Plaza was voted the 2018 International Toilet Tourism Award for Quirkiest. Imagine that!

We also went into other art galleries and the Roadside Sideshow Expo, which features "the World's Largest Collection of the World's Smallest Versions of the World's Largest Things." (Now that's a mouthful!) 

If oddities and curiosities are appealing, a road trip to Lucas might fulfill some of your hankerings for the bizarre.

The Ball of Twine and Other Scintillating Tourist Spots

 

It was raining when we got to Cawker City, Kansas, last week. But I still got out of the car to take photos of the World's Largest Ball of Sisal Twine. 

 

Actually, this was our second trip to visit the Ball of Twine. It was also a stop on a long-ago vacation with Jill and Brent. Let's just say that vacation was ... memorable. I have never claimed to be either a camping enthusiast or a fisherman. I didn't grow up doing either of those things. 

 

Usually, Randy and the kids had their own camping adventures. They'd visit some convenience store situated near a lake and they'd load up on Oreos and other delicacies. Poker 101 was part of the curriculum for these educational journeys. 

 

But for this particular long-ago trip, I consented to go along - mainly because we weren't sleeping on the ground. Even at that age, my back couldn't take that. Randy booked a "cabin" at nearby Waconda Lake. It was ... rustic. It was more like a trailer that hadn't been updated with decor or repairs since it came off the factory line many, many moons before. And, of course, it required bringing and fixing all the meals. Yay ... what a vacation! (?)

 

I'm always willing to hold a fishing pole. I may have a book in the other hand, but I'll hold the pole. We all tried valiantly to catch fish. We even had a guide. 

 

And we didn't catch one.

 

We did catch a glimpse of Cawker City's Ball of Twine. It's still a vacation that the kids talk about. You can imagine what kind of talk. I snapped the photos and texted them: Remember the BEST vacation EVER?

 

Just in case you haven't seen it yourself, here are the stats:

 

At 17,320 lbs, 40 foot circumference, and more than 7,938,709 of sisal twine, the Cawker City Community Club is the official owner/caretaker of the ball of twine. Each year a Twine-a-Thon is held in conjunction with the annual Cawker City picnic and parade, so the ball never stops growing. Frank Stoeber started the twine ball in 1953 on his farm and by 1957 it weighed about 5,000 lbs. 

Snapping the photos gave me an excuse to get out of the car. We were on a 5-hour trek from Topeka to Kearney, Nebraska. Earlier in the week, we'd driven from Topeka to Omaha for a short vacation with the girls. (More on that to come.) We then took them back to Topeka, watched a tennis lesson and stayed the night before getting in the car again to go to Kearney for the Great Plains United Methodist Church annual conference, where I was our church's lay representative. 

Not long after our brief stop in Cawker City, we started seeing signs for the Home on the Range cabin. Neither of us had ever been to this historic cabin. After a lot of rainfall in the area, we weren't sure whether the road off the highway would be firm enough to travel. But it was well-graveled, though I was glad we didn't meet another car. 

By the time we got there, the rain had stopped and it was a beautiful day. And the cabin is in an idyllic setting among trees and near a creek. 

It was easy to imagine how Dr. Brewster Higley VI conjured up the words to a poem he called "My Western Home" back in 1871.

At the time, Higley was living on a dugout that he built on the banks of the West Beaver Creek in Smith County, Kansas. Not long after, with the help of a few friends, he constructed a cabin in 1872. Dr. Higley presented the poem to his friend Dan Kelley who set it to music and then gave it to John Harlan, the leader of a family band that included Kelley. The song “Home on the Range” was born.

 

The plaque says: Dr. Higley enjoyed sitting outside his cabin, writing, meditating and simply listening to the sounds along his beloved West Beaver Creek. 

 

There were times he would play his violin with the music enjoyed by those living on the Jones Homestead just south of Home on the Range.

The location of the historic Higley cabin was approved for listing on the National Historical Register in 1973. The cabin site is 57 acres of grassland on the 240-acre homestead. The crop land is rented to a private operator. Net income from the landlord's share of the farming operation is invested back into the site. No individuals benefit financially from the site. The entire site is privately owned and managed by the Peoples Heartland Foundation, a 501c3 charity.

The restoration of the cabin was done in 2013, but the management of the historic site have even bigger hopes and dreams. They'd like to build a $2.5 million amphitheatre on site. As with most projects, funding is the obstacle. They have built a new bridge and have created a walking path named in honor of Pete and Ellen Rust, who moved to the farm in 1936 and finally attained full ownership in 1950. The Rusts and everyone in the Highland community knew the cabin was built by Dr. Brewster Higley VI, yet it continued to be used as a chicken house until 1947, when Home on the Range became the state song of Kansas.

 

It was during the following years that the Rusts had several chances to profit from the sale of the cabin, but in every instance, declined the offers because the buyers planned to move the cabin off site. They established the basis for the cabin staying forever on the site for the enjoyment of all who visit. The Cabin is open for visitors daily from daylight to dark. There's no admission charge, though there is a collection box, if visitors wish to make a donation.  

We thought it provided a nice little break from the drive and were glad we took the time to stop. From Athol, Kansas, it's 1 mile west on US 36, then 8 miles north on Home of the Range Highway (K-8). Turn left on 90 road for a about a mile down a narrow gravel road.

My Western Home

 (also known as Home on the Range) 

 by Dr. Brewster Higley

Oh, give me a home where the Buffalo roam
Where the Deer and the Antelope play;
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word,
And the sky is not cloudy all day.

Chorus:

Home, home on the range! 

Where the deer and the antelope play. 

Where seldom is heard a discouraging word, 

And the sky is not clouded all day.

 

There are several other verses. One I particularly like is this one:

How often at night, when the heavens were bright,
With the light of the twinkling stars
Have I stood here amazed, and asked as I gazed,
If their glory exceed that of ours.

For one of the verses, I believe the poet took some liberties. There may be some hills in Smith County, but there are no mountains. And I had to look up curlews. Yes, it's a bird. 

I love the wild flowers in this bright land of ours,
I love the wild curlew’s shrill scream;
The bluffs and white rocks, and antelope flocks
That graze on the mountains so green.

However, as I stood at the cabin site, this next verse definitely sang true:

The air is so pure and the breezes so fine,
The zephyrs so balmy and light,
That I would not exchange my home here to range
Forever in azures so bright.

I may make light of a big Ball of Twine (though I definitely admire Cawker City's efforts for a little tourism). But I, like Dr. Higley, would not exchange my Home on the Range.

On our way home from Kearney, we took part in a little Nebraska tourism. We stopped at Runza for lunch. A runza is what we in Kansas call a bierock - hamburger, cabbage and seasonings inside yeast dough.  

I'll have more from our trip to Omaha with the girls to come. 

Celebrating Milestones: A Farm-To-Table Experience

 

Jill celebrated a significant birthday in September. (I'll let you ask her which it was.) She chose a birthday meal at Saltwell Farm Kitchen, rural Overbrook. The route took us up and down hills and over dirt roads to a beautiful farm setting nestled among mature trees. 

This particular celebration was an adults-only gathering. She and Eric invited Randy and me, as well as Brent and Susan. They didn't figure the girls would appreciate the six-course tasting menu and the leisurely 3-hour supper.

But the rest of us certainly did.

Saltwell is named for the salty wells built on the original 1856 McKinzie Farmstead, Saltwell Farm Kitchen is 20 minutes west of Lawrence and 20 minutes east of Topeka, nestled in a grove of walnut trees and native Kansas prairie land, just around the bend from Clinton Lake Beach Park. Advance reservations are required.

 

They serve 50 guests per dinner seating each Friday and Saturday night. 

 

The tables are far enough away that you don't hear other diners' conversations. Each table is set with vintage linens and mix-and-match vintage china. 

 

During the months of May through early October, guests dine outdoors near the Potting Shed bar and culinary gardens. 

From mid October through the end of April, guests dine inside the old farmhouse around the antique wood-burning stove in a candle-lit dining room and bar.

 

Inside or outside, diners can add signature cocktails and mocktails to their evening for an additional charge.

The Saltwell Experience is a farm-to-table menu inspired by the seasons, local ingredients, neighboring farmers, and foraged foods.

 

We got there in plenty of time to walk around the grounds and enjoy the beautiful evening.

 

 

 

 

We entered through a vine-covered arch into the seating area.

  

 Waiters delivered each course with an explanation. 

Our first course was focaccia boule, flavored with aged cheddar and poblano, served with cream cheese Saltwell honeybee butter. Yum!

Course two was Crimson rosado gazpacho with coriander queso fresco and sumac tajin. The gazpacho included watermelon, cucumbers and tomatoes. It wasn't the favorite course for anyone at our table, but it was still fun to sample something we'd only heard about on Food Network. 

Third course was Goddess Roots - fresh herbs and tender greens with feral Green Goddess dressing and crispy cassava root. (It was definitely not like Green Goddess dressing from the bottle!)

 Fourth course was called Southside Southpaw - a Chicago-style hot beef arepa, a type of flatbread corn "pancake."

Beef was on the main course menu - a black pepper rosemary sirloin, served with smoked potato salad and garden succotash.

And the sixth and final course did not disappoint. It was Dubai Choco-Taco - a Dubai chocolate cannoli with dark chocolate whisked ricotta, pistachio phyllo stuffing and a pistachio whipped topping.

 (The photos probably don't do the food justice, but as it got darker, it was harder to capture good photographs.) 

 But the atmosphere was even better as the sun went down with the fire pit and the lights strung above the tables.

  

 

It's not every day that you eat food prepared by a James Beard-nominated chef - Rozz Petrozz. It is expensive, but it was a memorable experience to celebrate a special occasion. 

 

LIFE LATELY 

I've posted on Facebook, but the rest of this post is for me. We had a wonderful September, following Kinley's 8th grade tennis season. We definitely "kept the road hot" as I tell my friends, driving back and forth to Topeka to catch the action. And we wouldn't trade a minute of it.

 

Kinley had quite the fan club at some of her games. Our fellow grandparents - Alan and Christy - helped cheer her on. At another, Uncle Brent and Susan caught the action (though I missed a photo). 

The trip was a little shorter the day we went to Wichita Collegiate for tennis!  

 

At her season finale, she won 5-0 and took home the first-place medal in No. 1 singles!  

 

She started playing tennis at Genesis several years ago, and all her hard work certainly paid off. 

Her little sister has not yet made a total commitment to tennis. She's still playing the field - so to speak - with volleyball, basketball and softball. She says she's thinking about cross country when she gets to junior high competitions. So, time will tell.

But at one of our trips to Topeka for Kinley's tennis, we got to watch Brooke at her tennis lesson. So we'll see ...

However, she has totally committed to being a bookaholic, like her grandma. 

She did watch her sister play tennis. But she also read during others' matches.

I tell her - and her parents - that I'm happy to feed that habit. Jill asked if we could be to Topeka soon enough to take Brooke to Barnes and Noble so she could spend her birthday gift card. How fast could I type, "Sure!" (Pretty fast!)

I've supplemented the public library a couple of times in the last month. Once, the book Brooke wanted wasn't in their collection. The other time, she had been "waiting and waiting" for The Hunger Games. Grandma ended up buying it before she left town. (And Brooke finished it in a day!) 

 

We book addicts have to stick together.

It's always fun to have family with us at K-State football games.  

Kinley wasn't there, but Jill, Eric and Brooke joined us for the UCF game September 27.
 

We even got a win!

 Let's hope for a repeat this weekend. It's homecoming vs. TCU.