Our first stop of the day was the Louisburg Cider Mill. It's about a 30 minute drive south of Kansas City. It was another cloudy and overcast day, but it was supposed to be clearing and it wasn't raining.
Their sign should really be amended to say "Watch Us Make It (in September)". In our travels in New England we'd gotten to see cider made, and went to a really cool cider mill. There wasn't much going on at this one, and their prices for various foods and things were pretty high so we didn't buy much. The lady told us the only time they actually make it is in September, so there wasn't much to really see. The worst part was Lilli had fallen asleep, so we woke her up for this!
We let her have her first taste of cider and also part of a cider donut (what they're "famous" for.) She wasn't very impressed with the cider! It's a bit stronger than her apple juice....
I think I need my own cider mill!
The scenery during our drive that day was so pretty! And the clouds really made it look like Kansas, where a Twister could pop up at any time!
This area was called Flint Hills and it was so pretty. You could see for ages and the landscape was just green and made it feel like The Great Plains should.
There were cows everywhere....
And then we started heading into Oil country and you could see the oil pumps everywhere.
More Plains:
Our next stop was the town of El Dorado where the Kansas Oil Museum is.
Apparently there's a spare Statue of Liberty as well.
This was one of the first cattle towns, so the streets were wider for cattle to be pushed through.
Lilli was pretty excited when we got out of the car! I bet it had nothing to do with the great looking playground next door to the boring old museum.
When we hit the front door we were spit out directly into the gift shop where Lilli bonded with this stuffed wolf. Unfortunately since it was $20 their romance was short lived.She did enjoy the Children's room of the museum. It had all kinds of things they could touch and play with replicating life on a Kansas farm. It was a really great idea to have something like that in there. Brent looked over the exhibits while I played with her in there and then we swapped out.
I think Brent had a great time in the Children's area, too.....
I don't like hunting or guns and I'm glad I didn't have to explain how or why this cow was up on the wall.
Brent put the play boots on here while I was looking around....I don't think she was impressed!
They also had a lot of exhibits outside of all the various equipment used to produce oil.
Lilli really got into it - when she saw a stray cat out in the field.
Once we were done looking around outside Brent took her over to the playground so I could spend the rest of eternity in the gift shop attempting to buy a few things. Bless her heart, the lady running the register didn't have a clue how to work it and seemed kind of surprised there were even people there and especially that I wanted to buy a couple of things.From there we headed to Lindsborg, Kansas - AKA Little Sweden of Kansas. My tour books had described it as being quaint and a little slice of Europe. It was my major disappointment of the trip.
We had visited a little German town in Wisconsin two years ago that was just PERFECT! Little bakeries, great souvenir shops, beautiful houses, etc. This town was nothing like that. There were just a couple of seriously overpriced shops and there was really not much Swedish stuff there. A couple of houses but the rest of the town just looked redneck and awful and there was NO place for us to get Swedish food that evening! Everyone kept recommending their Mexican restaurant (which was good....but not what we were in the mood for!)They had these Swedish horses all over town - kind of like the guitars we have in Nashville. I let her sit on a few and that was probably the highlight of this town.
She wanted to give the horsies kisses!
I had booked our night at the Swedish Country Inn there. I got us the family suite, so we at least had a couple of rooms and some space to spread out. I wish we had gone ahead and moved on because we got there around 4 and literally were done looking around within an hour.
We had dinner at "the" Mexican restaurant and they gave us an extra salsa bowl. I guess we've taken her out for Mexican enough that she knows what to do - every chip she got she would dip in invisible salsa before eating! It was hilarious!This is what our room looked like - sort of authentic Swedish decor, but it was just a strange layout. All the sinks were in the bedrooms.
The other big draw to this inn was their "Swedish breakfast buffet". It was horrible. The woman in charge of it was just totally stressing us out - she was constantly bringing random things over and everything was horrible. She'd let you have the caddy of sugar/creamer for about 15 seconds before she'd whisk it off, same thing with syrup. I had visions of great homemade Swedish pastries in my head, and instead got stuff that looked like it came out of any Costco in America and waffles made from a big bucket of store bought batter. It was terrible, and truly was our disappointment of the trip. I'm pretty sure I have pictures of it for the next post.The big plus of this inn was that we had a rocking chair in our room. That made getting Lilli to sleep that night an A+, and sleep went really great. I think having some space and her own room really helped. We had found a playground that night in the town so she was also able to burn off some energy before bedtime.
Day 4 preview: Eisenhower, Oz, History Lesson, and back to Kansas City!
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