Our first stop was the Russell Elks Lodge. Nice big building with some pretty friendly folks. The next day we did some geocaching in and around the town. We found eight caches. The neat thing about geocaching is that it is kind of "forced" exploring of the area. You find the little parks in town, sometimes get to see historical or geographic features you normally wouldn't find, and occasionally learn a little history. This town is right in the middle of the Kansas oil field and one of the caches was inside of the local oil field museum. Learned a little bit about the history of oil exploration in the area. Another one of the caches took us to a huge sink hole just off the freeway. The sink holes are caused when the oil is pumped out of the ground and the ground subsides.
After staying in Russell for two days we were off to Topeka, Kansas, the State capitol. We wanted to go to the Elks Lodge, but the address that we got from the BPOE Elks web site
actually took us to a Lodge of the IBPOE of W. This was an organization that we first learned about a couple years ago in Florida when we accidentally came across one of the lodges there. This organization is the Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the World. They are also referred to as the "Black Elks". For those who don't know the history, the Elks, formed in 1868, did not allow black members until the late 1960's, so in 1898 a group of black community leaders formed the IBPOE of W. According to their literature they have nearly half a million members nationwide. Their rituals and activities are very similar to the BPOE Lodges. The lodge we came across in Topeka was closed, however, the order does allow BPOE Elks to come into their club rooms - we, along with our friends David and Marianne Conner, went into one several years ago in Ohio. We were welcomed in and had a good time chatting with the folks there and learning a little about their order.After a couple days in Topeka we moved east to the Kansas City area. Although Kansas City proper is actually in Missouri, we stayed just across the line in Merriam, Kansas, a suburb of the
city. The locals talk about KCMO (Kansas City Missouri) and KCK (Kansas City Kansas) as the two parts of the area. The second day we were in town we went on one of our famous Elks Pub Crawls, even though the entire area was under a severe thunderstorm warning and a tornado watch. We stopped in at four lodges on the Missouri side. One of the Lodges, the Northland Elks in North Kansas City had a tornado go through just a few days earlier. The storm had completely demolished a couple buildings right across the alley, but had only knocked a few tree limbs down at the lodge. Very lucky.Every lodge we went to bought one round for us, so we ended up having at least two drinks in every lodge. We didn't get back to the coach until about 9 o'clock at night. Fortunately, no bad weather came up while we were out and about. We did have a good time and added some pins to our banner. By the way, our banner is up to nearly 300 lodge pins now!
That night we had a storm come through the area with really high winds. About 12:30 a.m. we heard this huge noise and the power went out. We hadn't felt anything hit the coach and it was
dark and rainy out, so we didn't see anything outside. When we got up in the morning, the power was still out and we noticed that right across the road from us in the park a huge (five-foot diameter) tree had snapped off and fallen, hitting a trailer directly across from our coach. It was a small camp trailer and fortunately, the owner had gone away for the weekend so the trailer was vacant. The tree smashed down on the back of the trailer, near the bedroom - the weight of the tree lifted the front of the trailer completely off the ground. The limbs of the tree also hit the park's office/manager's house and punched a hole in the wall! It also fell right on the main power lines coming into the park, cutting power to the entire park. I'm not sure how, but the owners of the park had a tree service out there by 8:30 (on a Sunday!) cutting up the tree. We left at noon to go to a couple more Elks lodges in the area and do some sightseeing. When we got back to the park at about 6 o'clock, they had cleaned up most of the tree and the electricians (again, on a Sunday!) had restored the power to the park. Our last full day in KC we spent doing some geocaching in the area. Again, we found eight caches and had a really good time.On the 13th of May we left the Kansas Ciy area for Saint Louis. The trip was windy and a little rainy, but not too bad. We settled in at the Casino Queen casino in East St. Louis, on the Illinois
side of the Mississippi, right across the river from the St. Louis Arch. We had done most of the St. Louis tourist stuff when we were here a couple years ago, so we didn't spend much time in the city. We did go to a couple Elks lodges in the southern suburbs of St. Louis one day, and then a couple of Elks lodges on the Illinois side of the river on another day. We also stopped into the "Mother Lodge" of Missouri, St. Louis #9 for a visit. We had been in this lodge two years ago and found them to be pretty friendly. We made two very short visits to the casino while we were staying in their park, but didn't have much luck. They didn't have any nickel poker machines and the machines we did play didn't give us much back. The Casino Queen advertises the "loosest slots" but they weren't for us! One nice thing, Illinois bans smoking in all buildings open to the public, so the casino was non-smoking.On Saturday, the 17th of May we left St. Louis and took a long 85 mile jaunt up to Springfield, Illinois, the capitol city. We will be up here for four days, then take off to Indianapolis and our rally at the Indy 500! After we got settled in at the park just south of the city, we headed to the Springfield Elks Lodge. We had learned that the Illinois State Elks Association was holding their State Convention in Springfield this weekend, so we thought we could meet a bunch of local elks. However, when we got to the Lodge there were very few Elks there. (A lot of folks at a wedding reception in their hall, but few Elks) Although the Springfield Lodge was the host lodge for the convention, the events were all downtown at the Crowne Plaza Hotel. Today we are going to go out and do some sightseeing in the area. We will also probably do some geocaching while we are here.
In the last two weeks we have gone from Denver to Springfield, Illinois, just under 1,000 miles. We have dodged storms and been wet for the majority of the two weeks, but were lucky and didn't have any really bad weather. Even the wind that blew the tree down in KC wasn't really any stronger than some we have seen in the Indio area in the past. We have come to really rely on our weather radio and the Internet weather radar to keep posted on any possible severe weather. Most of the time we were in Kansas and Missouri the radar showed severe weather and tornadoes to the south of us, about 150 miles or so, but we never had any immediate threats. Hope our luck holds for the rest of the summer!
The next report will be after the Indy. Until then, enjoy every day!
