Wow! Kansas!

I never would have thought that Kansas would have turned out to be so memorable.  After staying the night in East Kansas City, we went right in the morning to Topeka.  We are getting good at learning how to eat on the road.  Everyone now knows to hold their bowls/plates with one hand.  I can lean into the counter and keep my stance wide, and I stand in the kitchen to make food.  Very cool. 

In Topeka we went to the Brown v. Board of Education National Park site.  This is the school that Linda Brown attended when her father was one of the plaintiff's challenging segregation in public schools.  We had the most amazing tour/discussion with a park ranger named Dexter.  He did an amazing job bring the story of this important case to life for the kids.  He was engaging and challenging.  Reid and Simon dove right in.  The NAACP wanted to include this Kansas school in the class action suit for a few particular reasons.  First the black school, Monroe, had just as nice of buildings and resources, better qualified teachers, most of whom has Master's Degrees, and no support of the teachers for integration.  What was beautiful, legally speaking, was the inclusion of this school district with a bunch of really terrible ones from more Southern states, challenged the notion of separate but equal squarely.   It wasn't about equal resources.  Social scientists were able to show that separate schools created a sense of inferiority for black students, and superiority for white students.   I was so proud of how the kids engaged.  Dexter gets major points from me! 

Kansas is a huge state!  It's beautiful and flat.  We enjoyed that a totally flat part of Kansas was a town called Manhattan, and that a dirt road was called an Avenue. 

Manhattan, Kansas

An Avenue in Kansas

Our next stop was a salt mine 650 feet underground in Hutchinson, Kansas.  While the hoist down was a big small, the excavated mine spaces were huge!  It was incredible. There was a museum which explained that all of Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas used to be part of the Gulf of Mexico.  The huge salt deposit under Kansas dates back to this time, at least 50 million years ago, and the eventual evaporation of the water.  We donned hard hats, learned about mining, took a ride on a train used to transport salt, and got to experience complete darkness of being this far underground!  Fun for everyone.

We had more driving after this, and enjoyed a nice swim at the end of the day.  All the RV parks we have stayed at have pools.  We are now on our way to Denver and just crossed into the Mountain Time! :)