May 28th - Kansas City, Missouri

We took a break from walking and drove down the road to Kansas City, Missouri, to take in a couple of museums. On our drive across Missouri we had seen billboards advertising an “Airline Museum” at the Kansas City airport, and that intrigued us. So we naturally drove to the Kansas City International airport and started looking around for a museum, but could find neither hide nor hair of it. We finally stopped at the State Department of Aviation building to ask for directions. We figured that someone their should know about an airline museum, and fortunately someone did—it turned out the museum was at the old downtown airport rather than KCI. He gave us directions that allowed us to get there and find the correct building, an old hangar, without any further problems.

For a $7 entrance fee we were treated to a personal guided tour for almost two hours. The tour first covered a static display area with several rooms crammed with old gear and memorabilia from the piston-powered era of airliners, roughly 1940-1960. I was impressed with a full-sized cutaway of the huge, double-bank Pratt & Whitney radial engines that powered these beasts. The “checklist” for Flight Attendants before starting their shift was, on the other hand, quite amusing. Some of the items like “WEIGHT ?” or “Hair length correct?” would be grounds for a court suit today. Others like “Hose seams straight?” just go to show how much things have changed—I’ve never had to check if my hose seams were straight and I don’t think Monika has done it for a long, long, time.

But out in the hangar lurked three aircraft, a Martin 404, a DC-3, and the star of the show, a super Constellation. The DC-3 was undergoing restoration to make it flyable, a process that had already taken 8 years and which our guide doubted would be finished in his lifetime. The Constellation is kept in flyable condition according to the normal FAA regulations and flown to air shows—he said they fly to Oshkosh’s Experimental Aircraft Association fly-in every other year and I think I have seen it there. Clearly this is a shoe-string operation that keeps going by the volunteer efforts of a group of people, and I rather wonder what will happen when the core of old aviation enthusiasts passes away but it was nice to see it all.

We continued to downtown Kansas City, Missouri, to find the museum of artifacts from the old riverboat Arabia—again the billboards told us it was in Kansas City but gave no further directions. Fortunately our aviation expert also knew that the Arabia museum was at the old city market. Despite the fact that this old market is smack in the middle of downtown we had no trouble parking. It turned out to also be a great place to have lunch as long as you are not wedded to fast food. The market is in the form of a large quadrangle and the Arabia museum is on one side while the other three sides have a miscellaneous assortment of shops and cafes with a wide range of available cuisines. We chose a middle-eastern place and had the special with stuffed grape leaves, hummus, salad, rice, pita bread, and falafil (if I have spelled that right). That gave us the energy to spend a few hours in the Arabia museum.

We were disappointed when we first walked into the museum because the first thing we saw was a gift shop with the rather usual assortment of tacky tourist items. To be fair, the gift shop also had some rather good books on the history of riverboats and such that I started reading while we were waiting for our tour to begin. It turned out that the museum was a very impressive slice of frontier life circa 1856. After a brief introduction we watched a nice video that explained the excavation and restoration process. It had started as more of a treasure-seeking expedition but shifted into a conservation and museum display emphasis when they recovered about 200 tons of artifacts from the buried wreck.

After the movie we were then greeted by one of the original excavators. Along with answering questions, he mentioned they had conserved about 2/3 of the recovered material and it would take another 20 years or so to complete the rest. Then we toured the very nicely done display areas for some of those artifacts. There was just about everything that you would need for daily life on the frontier, and that takes in everything from food and clothing to guns, hand tools, and sawmill supplies. The food was preserved in glass bottles, which was typical before canning became the norm, and one of the excavators had actually eaten a 150-year old pickle! A rather chancy thing to do, I would think.

There were many beautiful artifacts including porcelain and cut crystal glasses—some decanters had perfumes of the period which our docent explained were quite strong because the people only bathed a couple of times per year! (They had samples available and we liked the scents.) But there were also many mundane items like boots, hats, knives and forks—the latter with the long sharp tines of that period. It was all very interesting and the sheer quantity of it all was almost overwhelming. They had even used a part of the collection to stock a simulated “country store” with original materials, which I thought was a nice display idea. What amazed me was the sheer number of things they had exhibited and of course painstakingly cleaned beforehand. The amount of work that was evident was just great.

The tour ended with a layout of the main deck of the Arabia with reproductions of the boilers and steam engine. From a technical point of view that was very interesting, and it would have been even more interesting to see it all work in reality. However, those old high-pressure boilers were in reality very dangerous so I could understand why they used simulations rather than the real thing.

The one paddle wheel there was a reproduction based on what they found during the excavation and was powered by a crank in the same way the original had been. One thing I definitely did not know was that the paddles on the wheel were actually different sizes that corresponded with the power of the stroke of the steam engine. I had never thought about it much but had just assumed the paddles were all the same size, but it makes sense that the paddles in the water during the most powerful part of the stroke were the bigger paddles on the original wheels. Among other miscellaneous things, I learned the average age of the riverboat on the Missouri at that time was only 4 years—rough service and accidents all took a heavy toll.

So our museum day turned out as nicely as we had planned, and on the way back we found regular gasoline which changed from $1.40 to $1.39 per gallon while we were about ready to fill up. It was a small economic victory but made us happy. Back at camp we had time to take showers, which made us feel clean and virtuous as well as cheap. During dinner a hummingbird came by to check us out, which is a quite rare event. You really know when a hummingbird is checking you out because it will just hover in mid air and cock its head over to one side and give you the beady eye. This one was a green hummingbird about 4-5 inches long and he was so curious about us that he even poked his beak into the open door of the truck. Altho I don’t as a rule feed wild animals, I would have offered this one something except I couldn’t figure out what. I had finally decided on our runny blackberry jam as being the closest thing to nectar when it was off again with a final “thrum” and that was that.

In general, birds were very plentiful in this campground, but that was decidedly a mixed blessing. During the day, it is true, we very much enjoyed their happy cheeps and twittering. But at five o’clock in the morning it was quite a different story. Every day at this campsite we were awakened at five by the descendants of the Sante Fe Railroad warning folks with their Klaxons before crossing the Missouri River, and after that we couldn’t get back to sleep because of the morning cacophony of bird calls. Either birds really cheep louder when they are waking up in the morning, or it just sounds louder to me because I’m trying desperately to get back to sleep, but the end result is the same. Since it was light until 9 p.m. at this time, we tended to stay up past nine and wake up (literally) with the birds, so we were both getting short on sleep and becoming a bit groggy during the day.