Bill-on-the-Hill

And so, home, which takes a while; St. Louis is just about a thousand road miles from our home, and most of that, it is fair to say, is not over the most exciting terrain imaginable. We decided to make a Wikitravel "Itinerary" of the trip, following the Santa Fe Trail wherever feasible. This did add a little spice to what otherwise would be highway meat loaf, and I'll be concentrating on the Trail attractions here.

Following the successful conclusion of the Cardinals game, we high-tailed it out of St. Louis and into rural Missouri, pausing at the small town of Boonville, which is the nearest modern-day town to the jumping-off point for the Santa Fe Trail. Boonville is another one of those comfortable but boring little towns that dot the Midwestern United States, a reasonable enough place to live (provided you like the laid-back rural life) but not long on excitement. It does, however, have a pleasant city park or two, one of which overlooks the Missouri River at just about the point where the Trail started. The actual start of the Trail was at a town called "Franklin" across the Missouri from Boonville, but Franklin no longer exists, owing to floods and a change in the course of the river. Near the old Franklin town site, there are a few small commemorative sites, none of great interest; we took the I-was-there photos and moved on. All I can show of this fairly historic spot is a not-great shot across the Missouri from that park, looking toward where Franklin was. It's not a great picture, but neither are our times ... so:

Santa Fe Trailhead

There are a smattering of other Trail sites in western Missouri, but it was starting to get late (remember, we'd already been to a baseball game that day), so we skipped most of them and just made a bee-line for Kansas City, on an interstate highway with an exceptionally high density of billboards advertising adult bookstores and novelty shops. We weren't exactly in the market and just kept going, apart from one stop at a humdrum barbeque house east of Kansas City for dinner -- I'd mention its name (it was OK, and better than Denny's, anyway) if I could remember what and where it was. Lodging on the west site of Kansas City was similarly unmemorable, and the next morning, it was back in the car.

The main place on the Santa Fe Trail whose name most people remember (other than Santa Fe itself, of course) is probably Dodge City, but I will pass over it with minimal comment, because the modern Dodge City is about 10% historic site and 90% tourist trap. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it wasn't what we were following the Trail for. Fortunately, on the way to Dodge from KC, there are several more "genuine" Trail sites. One, Pawnee Rock near the small town of Pawnee (surprise), was a famous, or perhaps one should say notorious, waypoint for Trail travelers: it represented the half-way point along the Trail -- and for those heading west, the "easy" half was behind them at the Rock. It's preserved in a Kansas state park, sort of, but only half of the rock is still there; the other half got quarried away by Kansas settlers and is dispersed around the countryside!

A higher density of Trail sites is near the small town of Larned, about two thirds of the way from KC to Dodge, and we spent some time there. First there was the Santa Fe Trail Center, which looks suspiciously like a tourist trap but is actually a regional-class museum with a goodly number of interesting exhibits. I'll give its web page, http://www.santafetrailcenter.org, the honor of Web Site du Jour for this blog entry. Just a short distance down the road from there is Fort Larned National Historic Site, and we spent quite a bit of time there; it's a particularly well-preserved military outpost along the Trail, and the rangers there were exceptionally friendly and helpful even by the standards of NPS rangers at rural sites, who are generally a friendly and helpful lot. One little tidbit: many of the fort's buildings are just covered with incised graffiti dating back to around 1900 -- graffiti isn't as new, or as urban, a problem as we sometimes think it is. The graffiti are carefully "preserved" along with the buildings themselves. A sample:

Fort Larned NHS

Finally, one of the few remaining sections of original Trail ruts in Kansas is a short distance from the fort, and in our quest for "authenticity," we had to see those. The park rangers helpfully gave directions to this site, which we would never have found on our own, and we drove out into the boonies to find it, having an eerie encounter with a crop-dusting airplane -- think "North by Northwest" -- in the process. We survived and found the site, which is another one of those things that gives one a sense of the emptiness and desolation of the Trail in the old days. Again, this isn't much of a photo, but it's the best I can do, and it also includes my scenic wife , so:

Santa Fe Trail ruts

And with that, on to Dodge City for a forgettable dinner, a tiny town in northeastern New Mexico to bunk down for the night ( Clayton, in case you were wondering -- not much there), and home the next day.

Incidentally, we never did see an eephus ball, but we weren't really expecting to...