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.

By the Numbers: A Road Trip

Two Medicine Lake, Glacier National Park

Earth and sky, 

woods and fields, 

lakes and rivers, 

the mountains and the sea

are excellent schoolmasters, 

and teach some of us more

than we can ever learn from books.

– John Lubbock

 

Yellowstone - Grand Canyon of Yellowstone

 

 Summer Road Trip 2024: By the Numbers

• We left the morning of July 30 and returned home late afternoon August 10.
• We traveled 4,021 miles by car. 
• We spent about 76 hours in the car.
• We listened to 3 3/4 audio books.
• I took 800 photos - give or take.
  
• We traveled through six states (Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and Colorado.)
• We took a brief foray into Canada and used our passports for the first time.
  
• We visited three National Parks - Glacier, Yellowstone and Grand Tetons - and points in between. 
• We ate several foods featuring huckleberries.
• It took five loads of laundry to get us back to our starting point.
  

Grand Tetons

 

  Stats for Randy

• True confessions: I don't pay attention to this stuff. But when I asked him about things he wanted to add to my notes, the subject kept coming up, so I finally relented. 
• Gas was $3.25 per gallon when we left home. It ranged from $3.50 to $4.25 a gallon along the way, the highest being in Jackson, Wyoming. 
• Our car averaged 27 miles per gallon. 

And while it's always an experience to travel, there's no place like home for me.

Stafford/Reno County line, Kansas

 

I'll have a lot more from our trip. But downloading photos and writing takes some time. My pledge to you: I promise I won't share every photo I took. 

View from the Passenger Window

Our Garmin lady friend didn't get much of a workout during our Thanksgiving trip to visit Brent in Kentucky. It's really a pretty straight shot from here to there. We didn't even pull her out of the glove box except when we detoured to Santa Claus, Indiana, and later when we drove into Louisville to eat a Hot Brown at the Brown Hotel.

She didn't have to wear herself out, telling us "Recalculating" in that obnoxiously calm voice.

But 30-plus hours in the car caused me to do some recalculating of my own. Without a daily deadline for KFRM reports and blog posts, I think I read five books during the journey and while at Brent's. It had been a long time since I'd relaxed that much.

And I looked for beauty -- not in the quiet of a Kansas farmstead -- but at 70 miles per hour in the passenger seat of the car, when I thought the bridgework overhead resembled Christmas stars on top of the Zenith Co-op Elevator. 

"Narrow lanes" are a matter of context, don't you think? These massive bridges and their three lanes of pavement in each direction seem rather massive to me ...

 

when compared to the narrow bridge a couple of miles north of our house. That bridge gives a whole new meaning to "narrow lanes." (Just try driving a feed truck with no power steering as you come out a steep incline from the pasture and hit the "narrow lane" without taking a swim in Peace Creek.)

This time, we only saw the Gateway Arch at 60 MPH as we traveled through the heart of downtown St. Louis. (We stopped on our trip last January.)

None of our conversations were as complex as the bridge spans over the Missouri, the Ohio and the Mississippi Rivers.

Randy said he'd just read a marriage survey in The Wall Street Journal in which the author said that comfortable silences are part of a good relationship. We have that covered. (And that's OK.)

 I only live the full life 

when I live fully in the moment.

Ann Voskamp, Author, One Thousand Gifts

Beginning an early morning of driving in a motel parking lot near St. Louis

Here's hoping for a weekend full of memorable moments - big and small. 

Santa Claus and Turkeys

The calendar says December, but my dining room still says November. We just got back yesterday afternoon after spending Thanksgiving in Kentucky with Brent. I've gotten some of the Thanksgiving decorations transferred to the dining room table, but it definitely looks more like fall at my house than the stop-you-in-your-tracks fact that Christmas is only 3 weeks away.

The closest thing to a Christmas tree at my house are the cedar trees in a neighbor's pasture, providing texture to a December sunrise sky this morning. 

I guess it's good we got a dose of Christmas cheer on a stop we made on our 1,890-mile journey to Morehead, Kentucky, and back, since it may be a few days before there is any visible evidence of Christmas here on the County Line. On the way, we stopped at Santa Claus, Indiana. It began snowing lightly as we drove a few miles off the interstate and into the small community of Santa Claus. (They must have an "in" with the weatherman, don't you think?)

We spent some time in the Christmas shop there, and someone put my name on the "Nice" list in Santa's workshop. (I wish I'd taken a photo of the list, but I didn't think about it until we were down the road.)

We bought and addressed a postcard for Kinley, and I took some photos of Randy and Santa in front of the post office. Then one of Santa's helpers (just some local guy visiting the post office) stopped and offered to take our photo together. He said it's just part and parcel to take photos of strangers when you live in a place called Santa Claus.

  

I consented, even though I'd much rather be on the other side of the lens. Randy did, after all, put me on the nice list, so I thought I'd better follow through.

We seem to take cold and snowy weather with us when we visit Morehead, which dampens enthusiasm for outdoor tourist activities.

But it sure made Eagle Lake on the Morehead State University campus pretty. (It's my favorite place in Morehead, though Coffeetree Books and the Fuzzy Duck Coffee Shop are in contention, too.)

More to come from our trip (once I dig out from the pile of laundry, etc.)!

The Small Stuff

When you're a girl from the flat lands of Kansas, it's easy to get distracted by the majesty of the mountains. Practically as soon as the "Leaving Kansas" sign disappeared from our rear view mirror, I peered toward the horizon, squinting my eyes to see if I could glimpse the mountains in the distance.

It's not that I wanted to leave Kansas forever, but the sign did just welcome me to Colorful Colorado, after all. For this Sunflower Girl, the mountains are a novelty, a different kind of beauty than the sunsets that stretch for eternity and beyond outside my front door. Kansas is equally beautiful: It's just a different kind of beautiful.

It's hard to miss the beauty in the "big" things ... the mountains, the sunrises, the birthdays, the weddings, the anniversaries, the reunions, and all the firsts and the lasts.

But sometimes, in our haste to look forward to the next "big thing," we miss the myriad of small things that make up all those big moments.

I had already been thinking about this when I happened across a beautiful blog about this very thing. Emily at Chatting at the Sky, who was saying goodbye to her father-in-law, said it so eloquently.

With the magnificence of the towering mountains, it might have been easy to miss the yellow blanket of wildflowers stretching across a mountain meadow.

I might have walked right past purple flowers whose heads bowed under the weight of morning dew.

I might not have crossed the road to see the spikes of red hiding in a sea of green.

I may have seen only the rushing water of a river instead of pondering the petals of flowers nourished by the underflow.


I might have walked past a the fence row of wildflowers in my haste to begin a walk on a 2-mile trail.

I could have ignored the little flowers as I looked at the clouds teetering on the mountaintops in the distance.

And isn't that what we are prone to do in our everyday lives? We are so busy. We are so hurried. We are so frazzled. We are so consumed with checking things off the to-do list that we fail to appreciate the little blessings that God sends our way each and every day.

So, today, I will cherish the small things ... the tomato fresh from the vine, a favorite song on the radio, a phone call, the touch of a hand, the compliment I don't think I deserve, the email from a friend, the smell of freshly-turned earth on an early morning walk, a cool house on a hot day ... Small blessings abound, if we just pause to look for them. And after all, the bigger picture is composed of nothing more than the small stuff.

***

A clarification: The photos were taken in Grand Teton National Park, not Colorado. But I'm glad the photos of the wildflowers reminded some of my Facebook friends of their Colorado landscapes, too. During our 3,255 miles, we saw and experienced the mountains of Colorado (from a distance), Wyoming, Utah and Idaho. Beautiful!

A Snowy August Afternoon

The thermometer on the top of Rendezvous Mountain said 57 degrees. But factor in the psychological impact of seeing snow on an August day and being close enough to touch it, and it felt even more like long-sleeve weather.

(Don't you love the hair? It was windy on top of that mountain!)

We ended our day at the Grand Tetons by visiting Jackson Hole. During the summer, the ski resort offers rides on "Big Red," an aerial tram.

Rising 4,139 vertical feet from its dock in Teton Village to the top of Rendezvous Mountain, "Big Red" can transport up to 100 passengers and offers 360-degree views of the Snake River Valley and Grand Teton National Park.

We could see Jackson, Wyo., nestled in the valley from our perch at what seemed like the top of the world.

Speaking of which, we had Top of the World Waffles at Corbet's Cabin on top of the mountain. We chose the brown sugar and butter filling. (Our other options were Nutella or strawberry jam. We went the Paula Deen route. It was real butter ... yummy!)

No forks were required: You were supposed to eat them like a sandwich. In our defense, this was a late lunch and we shared.

The Old West logo provided a unique perspective on the Grand Tetons.

It wasn't an inexpensive 9-minute ride. But snow on an August afternoon? That was priceless.