Welcome back to our adventures! Steve and I are taking an extended weekend in the Kansas City area to get to a few parks. This morning, we started our day with Harry S. Truman's home (Harry S. Truman National Historic Site, and this is the "S" I'm referencing in tonight's blog title). This is a National Park Service hidden gem, because as the ranger on our tour put it this morning, the home and its contents are "100% intact." Basically when Mr. and Mrs. Truman passed away, their daughter Margaret went through and took the sentimental items for herself, but left everything else to the park service and she even helped design the tour layout. The house is literally left like the Trumans just ran out for some errands. Because everything is original in the house, they do not allow pictures inside of the home. The ranger made us turn off our cell phones too! A couple fun things we saw in the house were two house plants that have been kept alive since the Trumans lived there, and Harry's Stetson hat (and cane and overcoat). This was so neat to see so many original items in the house that belonged to the Trumans - typically in these house tours, it's only an item here and there that is original to the family. This was a real treat to see it exactly as they left it!
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| Harry & Bess Truman's wedding picture |
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| The church where the Trumans were married. |
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| Truman Home |
Our last park of the day was Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve. Steve and I were both looking forward to this park because it was our only shot at seeing wildlife on this trip (the rest of the trip is basically battlefields and we all know how I feel about those). Tallgrass has about 40 miles of hiking trails, and a free-range bison herd. There is a bus tour offered twice a day that we learned fills up very quickly with a waiting list. So we had to do the hiking if we wanted to see anything, which isn't the worst thing in the world. It turns out that the bison herd is actually penned up for the time being while the NPS counts and vaccinates them. So we were able to walk to the outskirts of the pasture where we watched the bison hoping they'd get closer for some better pictures for us. They felt like being lazy instead. Oh well, it was still cool to see! We also took time to check out the ranch house and the barn on the park property too.
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| We take a picture of all the entrance signs to a park - this is one of the prettier ones. |
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| Part of the bison herd, and that's basically the scenery from the prairie too. |
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| Buddy the Bison |
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| It was just a tad windy today. |
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| The Ranch house |
We hit two breweries today, too. For lunch, we went to Radius Brewing in Emporia, KS. This was delicious, and had one of our favorite sampler presentations! After dinner in Fort Scott, KS, we went to Boiler Room Brewhouse, which was okay.
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| Radius Brewing Sampler |
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