Last week my husband and I took a road trip to central Missouri to visit family, which makes this the third time in just over a year we’ve driven down there. The first time was a REALLY quick trip, down and back in 3 days to surprise our niece for her wedding shower, and the second was for her wedding a month later. This time was just for fun. I think we’re getting better – and worse –  at this road trip thing thing. We’re figuring out what we really need to bring but we’re also finding we bring too much. Needs include extension cords because we have too many electronics and the outlets are never convenient, and motion sensitive nightlights for the bathroom because we’re getting older, can’t sleep through the night, and when you’re in a strange place who knows what you’ll walk into!  Things we don’t need on a short road trip include my guitar. It was fun to sit outside at my in-laws house and play but honestly, it was a bit of a pain to haul it around.

The trip down was pretty uneventful, getting a little more than halfway the first night since we were able to hit the road around 4 PM, and then the rest of the way the next morning. We were fortunate enough to stop at another niece’s house on the way. She just bought her first home a few months ago, a fixer-upper. I did the same when I was around her age, and remember what a metric ton of work it was. Back then I didn’t know how to do anything and relied on a book from Reader’s Digest on how to fix almost anything. I learned about electrical (white to white, black to black, ground to ground – and disclaimer, that’s NOT instructions!), plumbing (which I still despise to this day), and lots of other useful stuff. Some of it I just made up as I went along. One example (which NO ONE should follow) was cleaning my basement concrete blocks of mold and mildew. Bleach kills mold, right? And vinegar gets rid of mildew? So killing 2 birds with one stone, I made up a mixture of both in water and cleaned the walls…and proceeded to talk like a frog for a week. I was told by a friend who was former military how dumb I was for that, because mixing those two makes mustard gas. But hey, the walls looked better! Another project that I did was refinish my floors, but I was poor and too scared to rent a floor sander, so I sanded the hardwood by hand with a wood block. It took me weeks and probably didn’t look as good as it would have had I rented a sander, but after sanding, re-staining and sealing it looked a lot better than before. Had the internet existed back then, it probably would have made my life simpler. Our niece is fortunate in that her father is close by and can help but it’s still her house and her responsibility and we’re really proud of her for taking this on. I can’t wait to see what it looks like when it’s done.

The rest of the visit there was fun, we did a lot of relaxing, some hiking, and had a lovely bonfire one evening. My in-laws live in the country, and he has a business selling firewood locally. One thing he does as well, is sell logs that are hollowed out from decay, along with color packs for the fire, and when you put that hollow log upright on a fire and toss in the color pack you get a really cool effect. Unfortunately we don’t have an open fire pit here, so we couldn’t bring any of the logs back with us.

The trip home was fun too. As we headed west of Macon, MO on highway 36, I suddenly spotted what looked like a large black panther in a field. I know it wasn’t a dog, wrong shape for that, and was very cat like but BIG. I did some digging and found a subreddit this morning from about 4 months ago, indicating someone else had seen it in the same place we did. While they aren’t native to MO, apparently there are sightings from time to time. I just wish I’d had the camera ready, so let that be a lesson to road-trippers…always have a camera at hand!

As part of the trip home we had decided to drive west to Omaha and visit the Strategic Air Command Museum in Ashland, NE. They have a number of planes and exhibits from SAC used during the Cold War. There is a U2 plane, the kind that Francis Gary Powers was in when he was shot down, an SR-71A Blackbird which is dramatically displayed allowing you to get quite close to it. My husband could have reached out and touched the pitot tube off the nose of the plane.

Then there is the macdaddy of them all, a Convair B-36J Peacemaker. 

You absolutely can’t believe the size of this thing, it is a monster of a plane. In the photo above, note the size of the cockpit relative to the rest of the plane. The wheels alone weighed over 1300 lb and had enough rubber for 60 car tires. The wingspan is 230 feet, the length 162 feet and the height 46 feet. Fully loaded it weighed 410,000 lb. In my photo you can see it – sort of – but it’s so darn big even standing on the catwalk above it, there was no way to get the whole thing in the photo. By comparison, an A320 plane, which is commonly flown today has a wingspan of 117 feet, length of 123 feet and height of 32 feet with a fully loaded weight of 171,000 lbs. If you are ever in the Omaha area, I would encourage you to visit, it’s a fascinating place. We ended up getting there later than expected so we didn’t get to see all of the exhibits, or go on the simulator, but are definitely planning to go again and spend more time. They are also getting ready to add a new virtual reality experience which should be fun.

The last day of the trip we did something else we’d been wanting to do for ages, and that was to visit the Spam museum in Austin, MN. Located in downtown Austin, it’s a great opportunity to learn about the history of the Hormel company and Spam. Apparently in addition to being hugely popular in Hawaii, it’s a favorite in Japan and the Philippines. In fact, it is so popular in the Philippines that Hormel has a variety to reflect their culture, called Tocino. The museum is free, and you get samples of Spam while you’re there so go if you are ever in the area.

What fun road trips have you taken? Feel free to leave recommendations for fun places to visit.