Road Trip: Up The Middle Of The Country

Day 10: Monday, May 13, 2024 - Jefferson City, MO

Day's statistics:
Weather: 84°, showers
Steps: Steve 9,391; Linda 7,080
Travel: 179 miles

Hotel bathrooms are usually not an issue, and not commented on unless there is a particular issue - like not haing a towel hook / bar. It isn't like there is no space for it. But why didn't they have any? Are we supposed to sit the towels on the toilet seat until we need them? Or on the tank lid? Its not like there isn't a HUGE amount of wall space for one...

Breakfast was light continental - this isn't usually a big deal, except for one minor issue.
In addition to cereal, there was bread, bagels, and muffins.


Since the main focus of the breakfast is: toasted items, maybe having more than a single two slice toaster would be in order. Perhaps put the money saved on towel bars into buying another toaster?

After breakfast, we returned to the room, brushed, gathered the luggage, and headed out.
Today we visited our fourth capital of the trip. We approached from the northwest.

We parked on the north side of the road surrounding the capital, in a visitor's parking spot, and took our selfie.

Across the street was a fountain.

There were some statues outside too.





We passed through security, and then got our stamp.


We started our self-guided tour.







The House was closed, but we got to look through the gallary door window and saw as much as we could.








We walked around the floor a bit, in search of the Senate chamber.


We eventaully found the gallery to the Senate - but we came across a similarly restrictive view of the chamber as the senate gallery was also locked. So we did what we could through the windows.





One of the wings had this skylight / dome (we aren't exactly sure which or where - but it is NOT the main capital dome) - but there was extensive artwork around the dome.



We were done with the chambers, and made our way to the rotunda - there was a lot of artwork on the walls in the rotunda too and text written on the headers and doorway tops.








We continued around the halls, admiring the artwork and such.


At the end of one of the hallways we came across a window that looked out over the Missouri River.

We turned to head, generally, in the direction of the rotunda. Again.
A decently dressed guy carrying a briefcase approached us.
"How are you folks doing today?" he asked.
"Great, thanks. How are you?" we responded.
"Fine thanks. What brings you here?" he asked.
"We visiting all the capitals, and today we're here."
He asked "Would you like a tour?"
"Are you offering?" I asked.
He paused. "Sure, why not." he responded.
Sweet. He said to follow him. So we did - into the office we were standing next to.
It turns out he was Marc Webb, assistant to the Speaker of the House.
He spoke to the three women in the office, then took us into the break room, and then into the house lounge.
The lounge walls were covered with a large mural, mostly depicting the history of the state.



He opened the door at the far end of the room, and talked to Luke, an intern, about joinung us on a tour - and told him to grab the keys.
Mr. Webb asked us if we wanted to go to the dome? Uh, yeah!
So we began to ascend to the dome. We started by taking an elevator - and a pass was needed to go to the floor we were going to.
We got off the elevator, went through another locked door, down a hallway, and then through a locked gate. When we arrived, he told us that this was a whispering hall - if one sits on one side, and speaks in a normal volume voice - even at 60 feet away - someone on the other side can hear with no problem. He demonstrated.
And I got some good pictures from above.



We were told a story about how the chandelier was lowered - all the way to the bottom - to be cleaned, and it apparently fell a few inches, and the tip of it (just below the lowest light) broke. And it cost tens of thousands to fix it.


Then Mr. Webb asked if we wanted to go on the top of the dome - on the outside of the capital.
Uh, sure, why not. I took the venture, Linda waited for us in the whispering hall.
The first shot shows the relatively narrow gap between the inner dome and the outer dome - I think it was eight to ten feet.

The stairs to the roof were attached to the top of the inner dome. On the way up the stairs and the spiral stairs to the very top, we saw the mechanics that operated the lowering of the chandelier. And you can just make out a tiny gap near the cable for the chandelier that goes to the open space below.



We finally got to the top - it was a narrow circular walkway around the top. I didn't think to look, and neither Mr. Webb nor the Luke thought to mention the statue that should have been right behind me while I was up there. But I did get to see the entire city from above.
I saw the Governor's Mansion and the Carnahan Memorial Garden, the supreme court building, a "regular" fountain, a "memorial" fountain (that reads "Missouri Veterans: Guardians of Liberty"), a state shaped sculpture, a couple of churhes, and a round parking cover (for the senators) with a walking path in the background.










I was told that when this hotel was being built (pictured in the first shot), they wanted to build it was a four story garage. That was denied and now there are these lovely parking lots to see (pictured in the second shot).


And the shot of the skylines.





We were only on the dome top for about five minutes. I think it took longer to get there than that.
We returned to the whispering hall, collected Linda, and continued our guided tour.
Every fifteen feet or so was an archway in the architecture - and they all had murals. I didn't take pictures of them all, just a trio, because we were on a private tour, but Mr. Webb specifically pointed out the bridge one because he liked it, and it supposedly was one of those that looks like the bridge is going in from one angle and out from another - though we didn't really see it.



Being the assistant to the speaker of the house, Mr. Webb had special access to the house. So guess where we went next? The Supreme Court. No, no, no, no. The cafeteria. Ha ha ha ha. Yes, the house.
Now we got to see it from the floor, not through the windows in the doors of the gallery. So the photos are much better (though a couple of them aren't any improvement, such as the large stained glass window above the speaker's seat, so they aren't duplicated).




From the house floor, we could now see things we couldn't before, including the mural on the wall above the gallery. Interestingly, we were told that all the soldiers in the mural... were the same guy.

Here's a close-up of a few of the soldiers - pieced together so they can be more easily seen.

In the corner, on a ledge, was this little gnome - it get moved about occasionally, and supposedly no one knows who does it.

We were at the speakers dais.

There was some interesting woodwork on the legs of the chairs.

There was some interesting woodwork on the structure too.

The four of us took a selfie as well.

Our time in the house chamber was over.
So where to next? How about... the Senate chamber too?
Mr. Webb found someone on the Senate side, and they unlocked the door for us. It turns out that Mr. Webb's wife works in IT for the Senate. And the gentleman that opened the chamber for us knew her too.
There were two large pillars blocking the stained glass window above (portions of the photos overlap).



Elsewhere in the chamber.







We spent an entire hour with Mr. Webb and the intern. We were glad we ran into him.
But there was more to see in the capital as it had a museum section in it.

While we do visit museums, we tend to NOT go out of our way to visit state history museums - and the capital had state history. We casually walked through and did see a coule interesting items.






After nearly two hours - and probably the best capital tour we've ever had - we started making our way to the exit.
We came down a staircase and found the Governor's office, a portrait of mark Twain, and a statue of Meriwether Lewis (of Lewis & Clark fame).



We came across a bronze bust of Daniel Boone - whose nose was polished because so many people touched it for some reason.

Upon seeing this bust, it gave me the idea to return to the second floor to look at the other busts as there were about forty-four.
I ran up there while Linda visited the gift shop. And it turns out the Hall of Famous Missourians was actually on the third floor - so I had to run up another flight of stairs.
When we were on our private tour, Mr. Webb happen to say something to a curator, who took us to one of the bronze busts - the first one below (and the only reason it is first though the rest are only in the order they were found) and told us a story about how the bust was "lost" until someone found it in storage.
These are the names that I recognized, though there may be some not pictured that other recognize that I didn't. They are cropped so if the face isn't recognizable enough, the placard will say who it is. And yes, a couple are a little out of focus.



















As we left the capital, a group of young school kids was making their was in. And it was raining.
We started to drive around the capital, and saw another statue on the other side of the stairs (phone picture, so zooming in is limited).

We got another angle on the memorial and the fountain, and we found the Liberty Bell replica that Mr. Webb told us about.



While not as huge of an issue - yet - as it is in some cities in Europe, or even the bridge by the Phipps Conservatory, but the "love lock" trend was starting here in Jefferson City.

We were going to go to the Carnahan Memorial Garden: but rain, and it was adjacent to the capital, visible from the dome top, and pictured above.
We were also going to go to the Runge Conservation Nature Center: but the buildings were closed - it was Monday - and anything else would have been outside and, well, rain.
More importantly, I wanted to "surprise" Linda a little by adjusting the schedule. The next place we were going to go to she really wanted to go to. But in order to make the adjustment, I had to tell her because we needed to leave Dodge Jefferson City in order to arrive with enough time. So we had to go to Kansas City now - especially since it was about two-and-a-half hours away and we also had to squeeze lunch into the day somewhere.

Our hotel was in Independence, a town immediately east of KC.
As we originally planned on doing some things in Jefferson City until later, we normally would have been driving toward KC later in the day, thus stopping at the hotel before getting to KC. But since we changed our plan and were doing something in the city before going to the hotel, we drove right through Independence and into KC.
As we got close to the city, we plugged LC's BBQ into the Google machine and started to head there.
We were driving along and passed by a BBQ place that wasn't LC's, but rather Big T's Barbeque. "Let's just go there." "OK".
I did a u-turn, and we headed back to the place, and we spied this slightly interesting bridge, with Big T's behind it on the right.

We pulled into the parking lot, and made our way inside.


We approached the counter, reviewed the menu, and placed our order.

Linda ordered the turkey sandwich with sweet potato fries, and I ordered the what-I-was-told-was-supposed-to-be-pulled pork sandwich with fries. A server brought us our meals.


The sandwich with fries was put in front of Linda, and I got the one with the sweet potato fries. So we switched plates.
I ventured over to the condiment section to hunt down some ketchup for our fries. They were out, and the only red condiment was hot sauce. So I walked to the counter and inquired about ketchup. The cashier told me its over there, pointing. At that, the server started to make her was to the condiment counter herself. We both arrived at the same time and I said "I see hot sauce, but no ketchup." She dug through the few packets there and said, "Give me a moment." and went off to find some ketchup. She returned and dumped a bunch of packets in the condiment tray - and I proceeded to pretty much take them all back to our table - I like fries with my ketchup.
When we started eating our sandwiches, I said to Linda "clearly someone doesn't know the difference between pulled pork and sliced ham."
When I take pictures, I frequently don't review their content when I take it, I just try to check it for focus, framing, lighting, composition, whatever - but not content. It might seem obvious NOW upon reviewing the photos, but we were about half way through the meal and I asked Linda if she wanted to try my pork, but she said "no, thanks". But then followed it with "Here, try this." It was at that moment that I realized Linda had the pulled pork and I had the turkey (which was smoked enough to mask the real turkey flavor {not that that's a bad thing}).
Clearly someone DID know the difference between pulled pork and sliced ham. Putting the right side with the right sandwich on the ohter hand...
We swapped sandwiches, and finished our meals.
The servings were plentiful and the food tasted good.

After our meal, we headed to the next stop: The National Museum of Toys and Miniatures.
On the way there, we saw this headquarters building for Russell Stover®.

Less than a mile further down the road we arrived at the museum.
We parked and as we were going in, there was a car with three women in it and they were trying to figure out how to use the wheelchair one of the women was in. It turns out that she was new to using it.
We entered, and started with a short video about the woman that founded the museum. She was a miniatures collector, and over time accumulated quite a bit. Then she had a friend join in on the fun. Eventually, friends told her "If you buy anything else, your're going to need to store it in a museum." And hence... the museum was born.
There were two floors of items. After watching the video, we proceeded to go upstairs.
Half of the second floor was primarily dedicated to doll houses and related miniatures. The scale of some of the content of the doll houses is lost in the pictures because there is no reference - and some of the items were truely tiny. And others very detailed. And ohters very detailed AND tiny. But if it looks small, it probably is.
Also, there were a few doll houses that were huge. Six or eight feet tall huge.
The pictures of the miniatures collection will essentially be presented in the order they were seen.










We were done with the doll house section and moved on to a room with some dolls.



And then we moved on to more toys. Display upon display of various toys from many different decades.

































In this particular example, there are a couple of close-ups of a couple of the rooms.



What was also humerous about this particular house was that it was behind plexiglass. And Linda took a picture of it too. But I noticed something that she didn't, and took advantage of the situation...

At the top of the stairs, all by itself, was this toy. It is a holocaust survivor's toy that is mechanical in nature, but does not contain any battery or power supply. Weights are put in the ring at the top, a weight falls onto the back of the climber who shimmies down the pole, drops the weight at the bottom, shimmies back up the pole, the ring at the top advances one, and the movement repeats until all the weights are gone. I should have gotten a video of this when I had the change, but didn't &😞.

The staircase wrapped around what could be considered a large barbershop like pole that slowly rotated, and was covered in toys.




At the bottom of the stairs we turned right, and entered the miniatures portion of the museum.
Again, especially here because there were quite a few items that were just in cases and not in a doll house, the tiny-ness of some of these pieces is lost due to lack of scale. Plus zoom also makes perspective difficult - but I'd rather see the detail big and not be able to tell that an item is not even an inch in size.
To give an idea how good the miniature process is, right at the beginning of the room is a chair next to a table with a candle in front of a wall with a picture on it. Hanging on the wall next to the chair is the miniature version of the same scene, and added as an inset to the full picture to show the detail of the miniature. (Yes, the set-up is there three times: 1) the left is the full size; B) on the wall in the middle is the miniature version; 4) the inset on the right is a zoom of the miniature on the right.

We continued to the right, across the back of the room, and into the next.
There were some displays that did include life-size items for comparison, so there was some scale in some spots.
Some of the pictures are zooms of the previous picture to help show some particular detail.



















































We completed the miniatures section, and came across a couple more houses.




After a couple houses, we came across some diaramas.















7





After the diaramas, there were some more miniatures.












The last section of the museum was an artists display.


Before departing, of course we "had to" visit the gift shop. There were a few toy, some puzzles, miniatures, and some older games.
These brought back some memories.



We were at the museum for close to two hours.
On the way out, we saw this sculptue by the door.

In the parking lot, we saw the three ladies that arrived when we did, also departing.
We got to the car and headed to our next desitnation.

Due to timing - it was after 3:00 already - we thought we'd pay Grace & Holy Trinity Cathedral a visit to look around like we visited the churches in Fort Smith a few days ago.
We plugged the address into the Google machine and headed there.
We spooted a couple of interesting sights along the way.


We arrived, parked, and Linda got out to check with the office about visiting the church. Though there were cars in the parking lot, all the doors were closed. I called the number for the church, and the system indicated the church should be open - even though it wasn't. There was no way to get to a human to talk about what was going on. After ten to fifteen minutes between the two of us, we decided to forgo the visit and leave.
We were getting to the point where we figured we might as well just go to the hotel and call it a day.
We put the hotel address into the Google machine and headed on.
Less than three miles down the road we happened upon Our Lady of Perpetual Motion Help Redemptorist Parish, so we decided to stop.
We initially missed the entrance to the church as it was in a gated parking lot, though the gate was open (I try not to drive along slowly with my signal on looking for this sort of thing so I don't impede traffic).
We went down the road a piece, did a u-turn and came back. Pulled in, and parked next to a staircase up a level.
At the top of the stairs was this wooden sculpture that appeared to be carved directly out of a tree stump.

A little further on was the door to the office. It was locked. We knocked. Then I Googled the church and called the number and found that the office was closed, but, more importantly, the church was closed and was only open in the mornings until 11:30 AM.
So we walked around a little bit to view the small grounds.




From the front of the church, we headed back to the car, passing this statue and a small garden.


We got to the car and continued back east toward the hotel.
On our travels, we saw some interesting sights - the traveling pair's navigator did the best she they could so some of the pictures aren't perfect - we were in a moving car, usually doing up to 60 MPH.

Even though we had to go "all the way back to Independence", we only had a fifteen minute drive to get to the motel.
We found the Super 8 and I checked in.
I returned to the car, but rather than just grab the luggage, or move it to a closer entry (we don't always get "the closest spot" when we park most places, but especially when we're wheeling luggage to our room, we sometimes try to), we left the parking lot.
We weren't going to have dinner because lunch was filling enough, but tongiht we were going to do something a little different.
At one point earlier in the trip - on one of those days where it was in the upper 80's - Linda made a comment about wanted to get some ice cream. There happen to be a shop across the street called Andy's Frozen Custard. So we drove over to it.
We looked at the menu, and decided to just order cups with one (for Linda) or two (for me) scoops.
The cashier said the total was like $12. Wait, what? It whould be about $8. It turns out that because Linda wanted to "one scoop with caramel topping", they had to turn that into their "blend", which literally doubled the price of it.
Linda decided that she didn't need to caramel and we just got the frozen custards plain.
We returned to the car to enjoy the treat (and yes, at this point it started to rain heavier).

We returned to the motel, brought in the luggage, and made it to our room.

The layout of the motel was a little unusal as it was configured like a split-level ranch house. In the lobby, there was just one room off to the side for handicapped use. Then there were flights of stairs to the side of the office to go down to the laundry machines and the breakfast area, and then to the other side, stairs either up or down to the rooms - the handicapped one was the only one on this level.

This night marked the halfway point of our trip (I hope it isn't the halfway point of documenting it because at this rate, I won't be done before we leave on our next one).
Linda had been able to wash some of her garments because they were lightweight and designed to be hand washed and quickly dried.
But being on a three week trip, we just wanted to convenience of being able to clean some of our clothes. And this motel had customer laundry facilities.
So we stuffed our clothes into our laundry bag (yes, we had one) and I headed down to the machines with a bunch of quarters.
I put everything into the machine, turned it on, and set a timer.
There were two of us doing a load of laundry, but there happen to only be one dryer as the other was out of order.
We don't usually have coffee at night so it won't interfere with our sleep. It was a bit early and I figured we could share a cup. While I was getting my cup of coffee from the thermal dispenser nearby, a woman from the handicapped room yelled down to me asking if I wouldn't mind getting her a lid for her coffee cup. I obliged.
On the way back to the room, I passed by this vending machine that supplied chips and candy. And laundry detergent and dryer sheets.

After the timer went off, I fethced our laundry. While I was making my way back to our room, another woman was getting a cup of coffee and she was eiether staying with or visiting the woman in the handicapped room. She yelled back to the woman if she wanted a lid for her coffee cup. I yelled back "No, some really nice guy got her a lid earlier." Ha ha ha ha.
AS the lone dryer was still going. I knew there was going to be a fight for using it so I just brought the damp clothes - they spun dry pretty well, but still needed a dryer - back to the room, and we hung them around to dry further overnight.
The rest of this story continues tomorrow.

We did our luggage thing - we had all four bags in so we could do the laundry and swap - relaxed a bit, washed up, and went to sleep.

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