Road Trips and Hike Reports

Our trip to Tulsa was kind of funny.  In theory and plan we should have been able to head out the driveway from the hotel in Manhattan, turn right, go about 2/3rd of a mile, turn left on KS-177 South and follow that all the way into Oklahoma where it would become OK-177 and get relatively close to Tulsa.  That is far from how it worked out.   Kansas is making KS-177 4 lanes for much of the Manhattan to Council Grove and there seem to be at least two places where the route is simply closed.  The posted detour took us onto I-70 west for quite a long westward leg.  I spotted a small road off an exit that would (and did) eventually lead to KS-177, considerably farther south than our initial detour so we tried that instead of following the entire official detour.  Yet when we got back to KS-177 it was still marked as closed heading south so there was either another closure farther south or the one closure was this far south.  We soon discovered that wo...

  Thursday We headed out from our hotel and visited the Harry S Truman Library and museum.  It came recommended from Dan and David and is the kind of thing I like to do but hadn't planned on doing this trip.  The museum is fantastic and seems to be just coming off a very successful remodel.  There were a lot of interesting exhibits and they had the best interactive touch screen exhibits I've ever seen.  We didn't spend too much time there because we had a drive to do and I already know a fair bit about Truman but it is undoubtedly one of the best museums of that type.   The drive to Manhattan went by relatively quickly other than that the museum had taken us 10 miles further east of Kansas City.  I meandered around the southern side of KC suburbia until we got into Kansas and then suburbia died out pretty quickly and higher speed driving set in.  The rest of the trip was quite speedy thanks to Kansas's generous speed limits.     We arriv...