We packed up the coach and left the campground about 10:30 and headed west on Highway 50 towards Hutchinson, Kansas. We are going to the Kansas State Fairgrounds in Hutchinson for a Good Sam Samboree. A Samboree with the Good Sam Club is similar to an Area or Chapter rally in the Family Motor Coach Association (FMCA). This particular one is the Kansas State rally. We heard about it from some people who were checking in at the campground with us, but it sounded like fun and fit into our schedule nicely.
The trip to Hutchinson was only about 25 miles, we didn’t even hook up the car, Jackie just followed me to the campground. The route that I picked to get to the fairgrounds, which is on the north side of town, had some construction and had a detour. I was following the detour signs, which were taking me through some residential areas, and suddenly the detour came to some other road construction with a road closed sign! They detoured traffic into a dead end. Fortunately, I was able to see that I could drive around the road closed sign and make a turn onto another street, otherwise I would have been trying to U-turn a 40 foot coach on a narrow, residential street.
We finally got out of the construction and arrived at the Kansas State Fairgrounds. They have a very nice campground with concrete streets, grass sites, full hookups and 50 amp electric. The site was perfectly level and everything was easy to access. This was better than a lot of the commercial RV parks we have been in. Because we got into the campground about 11:30, we were all set up and ready to go explore by 1:30. Our first stop was to go register for the rally. Since we only found out about it a week ago, we thought we would have to pay the extra $15 penalty for not registering early, by mail. However, the nice lady at the registration desk just charged us the regular $70 rally fee. A Good Sam gesture. Thanks. All of the people we talked to around the registration area were very friendly.
After checking out the schedule for the rally, which really doesn’t start until Thursday, we went out to explore. We drove around downtown Hutchinson and found that it looked very 1940's. It was almost like a movie set. Hutchinson is a fairly large city, about 43,000 population, which was founded in 1871 when the Sante Fe Railroad picked the site for it’s crossing of the Arkansas River. In 1887 large underground rock salt deposits were discovered and salt mining remains a big local industry today. The industry both mines rock salt as well as utilizes the tapped out mine areas for storage. Salt mines that are no longer in production can be used for a variety of purposes. The Hutchinson mine is home to Underground Vaults & Storage, a secure facility housing documents, artifacts, and other valuable material from around the world. Although natural gas companies sometimes use salt caverns for storing reserves and a salt mine in New Mexico even stores radioactive waste, the Hutchinson salt mine has never been used for anything other than storage of records. They do have a separate area of the mine where they do underground tours, and they have a party room which you can rent for special events. They will even bring in food for you.After driving around Hutchinson for a little while we took a drive to the town of Yoder, Kansas, about 20 miles south of Hutchinson. Yoder is a small, unincorporated town of less than 200 people, that claims to be the center for the local Amish community in central Kansas. The town was founded in the late 1800's by Amish immigrants. We expected to find some shops and stores with Amish goods, and perhaps see some of the local Amish driving around the area in their buggies. We were disappointed to find none of that. There were a couple of shops, but they were all just selling commercial trinkets and collectibles, nothing Amish. We didn’t see any sign of Amish at all, not even the telltale horse poop on the roads. Certainly nothing like the Amish communities in Indiana or even the small enclave we found a few months ago in middle Tennessee. We spent about a half hour there before driving back to Hutchinson.
We filled the Jeep with fuel and stopped and ran the car through a car wash to get off the layers of mud we collected when it rained last weekend, and managed to get one geocache that happened to be in the parking lot of the car wash. Once we had our chores done we went back to the campground and relaxed with the TV the rest of the evening.
Wednesday, October 3rd, we stayed around the coach until after lunch when we went down to the activities building to check out the vendors. Surprisingly, they had rounded up about a dozen vendors, selling jewelry, clothing, pins and badges, and other stuff. The RV park that we had stayed in before coming here, Spring Lake, also had a booth. At 1:00 Jackie participated in a crafts class that she had signed up for yesterday. The class was to make a small, decorative Christmas Tree. I went back and stayed at the coach until she was done with the class, then picked her up and we went out to do some geocaching. We were only out for a couple of hours, but managed to get nine new caches, with no DNFs. Several of the caches were in old, local cemeteries. As we have said before, they like to do cemetery caches here in the Midwest.
After caching we went back to the coach for happy hour and an early dinner before going back to the activities center for evening activities. Tonight the rally organizers introduced the vendors and then we sat for an hour with the evening’s entertainment. The entertainment was a group of a half dozen rally participants who had put together a sort of jam session. It was a little corny and rural, mostly VERY old country music and some gospel, but it was entertaining. This is a very farm oriented, country group and the majority of them appear to be a little older than us, so I guess this kind of stuff was right up their alley. We mostly stayed because they were drawing for door prizes after the jam session. We stayed, but didn’t win anything in the drawings. After the drawings we went back to the coach and relaxed the rest of the night.
Thursday, October 4th, the first official day of the Samboree, but there have been things going on around the rally for a couple of days. We went over to the activities building in the late morning to walk around the vendors one more time. We went back to the coach for a quick lunch and then at 12:30 we went back over to the activities area for a Skipbo tournament. For those that are not familiar, Skipbo is a card game that works well for two, four or six people. It is one of the few card games that I enjoy playing, and Jackie and I play frequently, usually when we are doing our laundry. When we saw they were having a Skipbo tournament at the rally we signed up. Now we have played the game with other couples, but we have never played the game with partners, which is how the tournament is set up. We have also never played what the other people there called “competition Skipbo” which has a lot of rules, the most important of which is that there is NO talking other than that, during his or her turn, a player may tell his partner which cards to play from their stack, but only during their turn. The partner is not allowed to make suggestions or speak in any way and there is no other conversation allowed at the tables. VERY quiet room when the game is going on.
Jackie and I think of ourselves a pretty good players, and we both won our first games. By the way, we were not allowed to play as partners, partners are randomly assigned at the beginning of the tournament. My partner and I won the semi-final match and moved on to the finals, where we lost pretty badly. Jackie and her partner lost their semi-finals game. Still, it was fun and we would do it again if the opportunity comes up. After the card game we went to a meeting for first time attendees, which we are as far as Samborees are concerned. After the meeting we went back to the coach and relaxed for a couple of hours before dinner.
We had an early dinner and were back in the auditorium at 6:45 for the opening ceremonies of the rally and the evening entertainment. They introduced all the State Directors and other Good Sam Club dignitaries that are at the rally and each of the state’s talked about their own Samborees that are coming up, either later this year or next year. After the opening ceremonies the evening entertainment came on, which tonight was a brass quintet, made up of folks who play in the Hutchinson City Band. Tuba, French horn, and two trumpets make up a quintet, by the way. They played for about an hour, and were not terrible. Not exactly our cup of tea as far as music goes, but we stuck around so as not to be rude and also because they were drawing more door prizes afterwards. We actually won something this time - a three gallon water cooler. Not exactly sure what we are going to do with it, but we won it! After that we headed back to the coach and relaxed the rest of the night.
Friday, October 5th, it is really starting to get chilly here in the heartland. Probably not for the locals, but certainly for us. It was in the mid-40 this morning, with a brisk wind, and we are thinking we may have outstayed the good weather. We didn’t have much going on with the rally, so we spent the morning in the coach taking care of chores. I had a lot of administrative work to complete, mostly travel planning. We are planning to go up into Oregon next summer and want to have some work done on the coach, interior remodeling mostly. I needed to have a rough idea of when we might arrive in Oregon so I could start making arrangements with the shop we are going to use for the work.
About 2:15 or so we walked over to the activities area and walked around the vendor area again. Jackie had bought some bling for one of her sweatshirts and had the lady at the booth put it on, so she had to pick up her sweatshirt. We also wanted to be in the area at 3:00 for the ice cream social. In case you hadn’t guessed by now, ice cream is a big deal at rallies. As usual, people started lining up fifteen minutes early, never know if they have enough ice cream. This one was a little odd in that instead of ice cream bars or sandwiches, they gave out pint containers of Kroger vanilla ice cream. But, they didn’t have any spoons! We took ours home and put them in the freezer for dessert later tonight.
We didn’t feel like going to the entertainment tonight, so we just stayed in the coach the rest of the afternoon and evening. I finished my travel planning and now have our winter and spring plans plotted out. I also made a few reservations for our travels this winter. I contacted the repair shop in Oregon and told them what we wanted to have done and let them know we would be there in May, so put us on the schedule. We are going to email them a detail list of the work so they can give us some cost and time estimates. All in all, I got a lot done today.
Saturday, October 6th, the last full day of the Samboree and we woke up to the threat of rain. We stayed around the coach until about 3:30 or so when we went down to the activities area for raffle drawings. The first part of the program was the recognition of awards. One thing about the Good Sam Club and their Chapters, they like awards, patches and pins. Chapter members, especially those in leadership positions, wear vests that are just covered with embroidered patches. They give awards for attendance, most from a chapter, furthest chapter at the Samboree, most anything you can think of. They were giving awards for Samboree attendance, they give a star for every ten Samborees you attend, and some were getting their 16th and 17th star, which means they have been to 180 rallies! That’s dedication to the club.
After the awards they started pulling tickets for the raffles. We had bought several sets of raffle tickets, one set for a 50/50 drawing that netted the winner about $140, some for a little flatscreen TV, some for several different Camping World items. They pulled all the raffle tickets and we didn’t win anything. Rats. After the awards we went back to the coach for about an hour before leaving again to go have dinner. We wanted to get an early dinner because we wanted to be back by 6:45 for the evening entertainment.
We found a Mexican restaurant here in Hutchinson called Playa Azul, that was only a mile or so from the fairgrounds. It good reviews on the Internet, so we decided to try it. It was a nice little place, decorated much like most of the Mexican restaurants in California or Arizona, and all of the staff was Mexican. They had a full bar and a very large menu with a lot of regular Mexican combos, as well as some very nice dinners, including a large selection of seafood. The prices were very reasonable and the service was good. The food was good, not the best, but certainly adequate and better than most Mexican we have tried east of the Rocky Mountains. We had dinner and got back to the fairgrounds just in time for the evening entertainment.
This is a small country group, a husband and wife and the husband’s brother. They only have a drum set and keyboards and the wife, Misty, does most of the vocals. They have been in the business for a number of years and are apparently pretty big with the Inspirational Country Music crowd. They put on a pretty good show with some interesting arrangements of some really old country music, along with some original stuff they wrote. They only went about an hour, but it was the best entertainment of this rally. After the show they had the final drawing for door prizes, but we didn’t win anything. We then went back to the coach and watched TV until bedtime.
Sunday, October 7th, we were awakened about 7:00 by the sounds of some of the rigs around us packing up and getting ready to leave the campground. We had elected to extend here one day, just because we were in no big hurry and there was a hot rod run in Hutchinson this weekend and I wanted to go see the cars. By 12:30, when we finally left the coach, we were completely alone on our side of the campground, except for a couple of rigs way down on the end that also extended their stay.
After the car show we went after one more geocache, a virtual cache that was located at Hutchinson’s Space Museum, the Cosmospere. The cache was outside of the museum and was at the display of an F-1 rocket engine, the same type of engine that was on the Saturn V rocket that launched all of the Apollo moon missions. The Saturn V had five of these engines on the first stage. We didn’t have time to visit the museum, but it is the only museum outside of the Smithsonian system that is allowed to possess and restore actual space program artifacts. They have an extensive collection of authentic artifacts, including a Russian Vostok space capsule and the actual Apollo 13 command module which brought the crew of that ill-fated moon mission safely back to Earth. We made a quick trip to Walmart for supplies and then headed back to the coach so I could get the window screens off and the outside decorations put away in preparation for our departure tomorrow. After I got my chores done we relaxed in the coach the rest of the evening.
Monday, October 8th, we packed up the coach and left Hutchinson about 9:30, heading southwest to our next destination, Liberal, Kansas. Liberal is about 210 miles away, so we wanted to get an early start. The trip was pretty uneventful, other than some wicked head winds, which at times made driving difficult and played hell with our fuel milage. We made one stop for fuel and lunch in Dodge City, and arrived at the Seven Winds RV campground in Liberal just before 2:30. We got set up, but didn’t go out to explore because we were pretty tired from the trip. We just stayed in and watched TV the rest of the evening.
Don loves to give people hugs when he meets them and has always called himself “the hugger from Hooker.” I think Don and Wanda are in their 80's, but they still travel some, although not as much as they used to. Don has lived in Hooker all his life and actually lives only two miles from where his parents lived when he was born. Last August we passed through Hooker and stopped for a few days, at the only RV park in town, and had a great time with Don and Wanda. Hooker’s town motto, they sell tee shirts with it, is “It’s a location, not a vocation.”
We had called Don when we got into town yesterday and made arrangements to meet them for lunch at the Hooker Soda Fountain and Grill, a great little place to eat in downtown Hooker. They actually live about ten miles out of town, but we had eaten a couple of times at the soda fountain, which is in the old Rexall Drug Store building, last year when we were here and loved the food. Since we weren’t going to meet the Fischer’s until 12:45, we stopped at a couple of geocaches between the RV park and Hooker. We picked up three caches before arriving in Hooker and were going to try to get one new one that had been placed in Hooker since our last visit. However, we had to skip it because was right across the street from the schools and there were all kinds of kids running around because it was lunch time. The grade school, junior high and high schools area all on the same corner. We made a quick stop at the Hooker chamber of commerce to see if they had any new tee shirts before going to the restaurant to meet the Fischers.
We spent about two hours at lunch, which was quite good again, talking and sharing our experiences of the last year with Don and Wanda. Last year when we were here Don had taken Jackie and I on long tours of the farms around the area, teaching us “city folk” about farming life. He wanted to take us out again today to watch the corn harvest, but we didn’t want to put them out hauling us around again, so we declined. We had a great visit and hope to see them at one of the FMCA rallies in the spring. They are considering going to the January rally in Indio, or the March rally in Tucson. We are going to both and hope to cross paths with them again.After lunch we made an effort to get the cache in Hooker near the schools, but we were unable to find it. Rats, a DNF. We then set out to find some cemetery caches that were scattered around the surrounding countryside. They were all about 10 to 15 miles apart, so it took us a while. We managed to find two of them, but we garnered another DNF with one. By that time it was 4:30 and time to head back to the coach. We had a great lunch, met some good friends, and found five new caches, along with two DNFs. All in all, a pretty good day. We spent the rest of the evening in the coach watching TV and relaxing.
Wednesday, October 10th, we left the coach after lunch to do some geocaching in the Liberal area. There were not a lot of caches in the city because we were here a year or so ago and found most of the caches close in to town. They haven’t added many since then. Even though we had to drive twenty miles north of town to find some caches, we managed to get nine new finds in a few hours, with no new DNFs. After caching we stopped at the grocery store for a couple of things and then went by the Liberal Elks Lodge.
We had visited the Elks in Liberal twice during out stay in the area last August, but were unable to find anyone who could get us a lodge pin on either visit. Their web site said that they were open from 4:00 to midnight, Tuesday through Saturday, so about 4:30 we went by the lodge for a visit. The place was locked up, no cars in the lot, no one around. I guess we are destined to not get a lodge pin from the Liberal, Kansas Elks. We had nothing else to do, so we headed back to the coach and relaxed the rest of the night.
Thursday, October 11th, another travel day. We were packed up and on the road at 9:30, finally headed officially out of the Midwest and back into the west, or at least the Rockies. Our destination today was Capulin, New Mexico, a little village of a few dozen folks in northeast New Mexico. The trip was just under 200 miles, and other than another day of headwinds and uphill travel, it was a good trip. We crossed into New Mexico, and therefore into the Mountain Time Zone, at 11:30 and promptly got the last hour back to use again.We arrived at the Capulin RV Park at about 12:30 local time and got settled into our site. This is a very small park and the office was closed when we came in, so I picked what I thought was a full hookup site and parked the coach. As I was starting to hookup the sewer I noticed that the sewer cap was locked down and couldn’t be opened. About then the owner of the park came back and came over and told me that the sites on the end, where I picked, didn’t have a working sewer. They are connected to the sewer system, but the county hadn’t given them approval for all the sites they put on the sewer system, so they had to lock some off. He relocated us to another full hookup spot and we got moved in. The funny part was I moved the coach a couple hundred yards, from one spot to the other, with the slides out. Lots of room and I couldn’t see any reason to bring them in. Odd feeling though, to look in the mirrors and only see slides.
We will be here in Capulin, which is quite literally in the middle of nowhere, for three nights. Since we have officially left the Midwest and are now back in a part of what is considered to be The West, it marks a good time to get this episode published. We still have about two weeks of travel through New Mexico and Arizona before we get to our “home” in Pahrump, and I will publish again after we arrive there. Until the next time, keep smiling, it makes people wonder what you are up to. Bye for now.
