Get the Heck Into Dodge!

This lineup of wild cowboys greets you as you are approaching Dodge City, Kansas.  It was once known as the "Wickedest Little City in America"  or "Beautiful Bibulous Babylon of the Frontier"!   Since we go to Dodge every Thursday to teach an Institute class, we decided to take in some of the sights.

This very tired, downtrodden looking Indian is just off a side road by the wild cowboys cutout.

This wild and wooly town had many famous lawmen such as Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and the Masterson brothers.  Here is Wyatt in the main part of town and here you see Elder Riggs ready for a card game with him.

When the railroad was established here in Dodge, they began the long cattle drives from Texas.  The cowboys discovered that sometimes a long horn steer would establish himself as the leader of the herd.  When that happened, drovers often kept the steer for use on later cattle drives.  The monument here is "El Capitan"  a tribute to those longhorn cattle leaders.  I wouldn't want to mess with those horns!

These two are part of the Dodge City Trail of Fame Medallions honoring actors who played key roles in movies about Dodge City. Henry Fonda is honored for playing starred as Wyatt Earp in a 1946 movie.

James Arness played Marshall Matt Dillon in 617 episodes of Gunsmoke over a 20 year period.  

We haven't been  in to tour the Boot Hill Museum and the rebuilt fake Front Street.  The original Front Street, along the railroad track burned down a couple of times so they rebuilt it with brick buildings and just made this one for tourists.

As the cattle drives ended and the town became more civilized, they built some lovely buildings like this Andrew Carnegie Library which has now become home to the Dodge City Arts Council.

This is Dodge City Community College or DC3 as they call it for shorthand.  

This sculpture stands on the campus.  I think it is a fitting tribute to those plainswomen who weathered the constant wind and loneliness to help settle the 'west' as it was known then.

Outside of Dodge you come to this Historical Marker telling about the Santa Fe Trail which became a great commercial route between Missouri and Santa Fe, New Mexico.  

You can see the actual wagon ruts still there from thousands of wagons that traveled this trail and went west from Dodge City along the north bank of the Arkansas River into Colorado.

I have more pictures to post but haven't taken them off my camera yet.  So this is probably enough  for one post.  This country is very interesting and we are enjoying getting to know the culture of the 'Old West'.  Funny, but we thought we lived in the West!

Dorothy in Oz Kansas!

Look who we met in Liberal, Kansas!  Here I am with Dorothy and her dear little Toto.

We had to drive to Liberal, about and hour and 20
minutes from Garden City, to meet the Stake President.  He suggested that we meet him there since he would be there for a ward conference.  He lives way northwest in Goodland, a little town near the Colorado border.  These Kansas folk think nothing of driving several hours for most anything.  We are getting used to it since we drive for more than an hour for all three of our institute classes.













This is the sign we spotted on the highway as we were driving around doing a little exploring.  Brannick remembered seeing it as we drove north from New Mexico, then Oklahoma, then into Kansas.  Our stake actually goes south a little further to Guymon Oklahoma.

Here we found Dorothy and Toto.  Her blue checkered dress is a little faded from the weather but she still has her ruby slippers and perky pigtails.

Here we find her friend the Scarecrow who wanted a brain. Doesn't he look like he could use one?

Here is our Tin man without any rust on him at all.  Guess he kept the oil can going through the humidity and cold winters here.  

And of course, our Cowardly Lion who looks pretty cowardly.  

This is the Museum which looked pretty interesting from the outside but it was closed since it was Sunday.  Hope we get that far south sometime again so we can check out the inside.

This is a view that takes in a lot of the Yellow Brick Road whose bricks were inscribed with donor's names.  Don't you love the sunflowers ?  They must be the state flower as we see them everywhere.

Well, there now you have taken a trip to Dorothy's Oz in Kansas. Just remember as Dorothy said, 'There's no place like Home!'  (At least I think she said that  :)

Garden City missionary digs

 This post may be a little boring for some of you but our family is always interested in what our living situation looks like.  So I will give you a tour of our Garden City Duplex before we move to Scott City in a couple of weeks.

We live about 10 minutes out of the city up on a little rise where a builder has developed about 20 duplexes and is very picky about who they rent to so it has been kept very nice.  The second garage door is our place 1244 Shannon Road, Garden City, Kansas 67846 (in case anyone wants to give the postman something to deliver to our very empty mailbox  :)

Missionary apartments don't need much in the way of furniture so this is the extent of ours in the living room.  Walls are so bare!  I miss the lovely artwork and pictures of the Savior we had in our Guatemalan temple apartment.  We also have two folding chairs and four dining room chairs if we have a Family Home Evening with our students.

We have two tables like this, one in the dining room and one in the extra bedroom which we use as a study room.  Two wooden dining room chairs in each room.  Functional, hard, and adequate.  I'm glad I stuck in that table runner from our China mission and wish I had bought some of the beautiful cloth in Guatemala.  

 This is our small but efficient kitchen.  You can see that the biggest challenge is so little counter space, so one of our first purchases was a stand for the microwave to be in the dining room to free up some counter space.

The laundry room is in the passage way from the garage to the kitchen and must include a place for the kitchen trash container as there is nowhere to put it in the kitchen.  We have a few other rooms like a small bathroom and a bedroom but they aren't anything unusual to take a picture of so I will just leave them to  your imagination.

We love to take our morning walks around the development and down the country roads.  It has been so rainy here lately that this is what we found one morning.  I thought it looked like a fairy ring.

Can't you just imagine elves cavorting around and on top of these cute things in the moonlight?

You will probably see lots of pictures of sunflowers as I love them so much.  This is just down the road apiece on the corner of Farmland Road and Shulman.  Aren't they gorgeous?

Adios Guatemala - Howdy Kansas

                        

We loved the opportunity to serve the Lord in the Quetzaltenango, Guatemala temple but unfortunately after four months we had to return to the US to get some badly needed medical care for Brannick.  These pictures above are our last day there in front of our beautiful temple saying goodbye to our temple president, President Galvez and his wife.  Also a sad farewell to our dear friends, Ken and Chrys Meadows, who were instrumental in our going to Quetzaltenango and were the ones we enjoyed so many adventures with.

On the day we left Quetzaltenango to drive to the capital, Guatemala City, the airport was closed because one of the volcanos had decided to get active.  This was taken on the way into the city.  Fortunately, the airport was open the next day when we flew out headed for the states.

It took us six months to get things straightened out with the doctors and to make sure everything was working all right. When we got the 'all clear' from the doctors, we requested  a reassignment to finish our mission and received a call to go to the Kansas Wichita Mission to teach religion classes to young single adults and college age kids.  We were delighted!

We left on Monday, August 3 to make the two day trip to Garden City, Kansas. Here is our 'Welcome to Kansas' sign.

This is one stop we made to wave goodbye to the mountains as we had heard we would no longer be seeing them on the flat plains.

And sure enough, here we see where the flat land meets the sky with no mountains in sight to hold it up!

These beautiful wild sunflowers are all along the roadsides and remind me so much of my childhood.  My mother would always put our sunflower bouquets we brought her in her prettiest vase.  These grew all along the lane in Lehi so we picked them for her often.
 

Traveling back from one of the small cities we will be teaching in, we came across fields of huge sunflowers so I couldn't resist a picture.

I thought Arizona held the award for the most beautiful sunsets and I would miss them but as we were returning from Dodge City last week, I snapped this one.  It was a beautiful sky for a long time.  We will miss some things from our home in the desert with mountains surrounding Tucson but we are finding lots of things to love here in Kansas.  So check back and you will find more as we learn about the culture in the Heartland. 

The Ancient Ruins of Tikal

If you haven't read our two previous posts about our January 2015 trip, you should do so.  We traveled first to Copan, Honduras, then to Rio Dulce, Guatemala.  Now I am ready to post the next leg of our trip, the towering ruins of Tikal.

On Friday, January 9th, we left Rio Dulce in the rain and traveled about four hours to Santa Elena, Guatemala.  The next morning we drove about another hour to get to the entrance of Tikal.

In the parking lot this cute little girl met us selling her corn husk dolls for such a cheap price (about a dollar each) we couldn't resist taking a picture with her and our purchases.

 Just as we started our walking tour we passed a small shop where we stopped to watch a woman using a back strap loom to weave beautiful table runners. Notice her little boy who just plays there quietly all day while she works.

 Chrys and I couldn't resist each buying one as they were so colorful and typical of Guatemala.  They are all the more special because we bought them from the lady who created them. This beautiful blue one is the one I finally chose with the Quetzal birds and other significant native designs.

Lest you think this was just a shopping trip, I will now go on to tell you about the sights in the temples of Tikal.  This Mayan city was one of the most extensive and densely populated and is also one of the oldest, having become populated in the 7th century BC.  Below you see the typical design of the temples here with the white apron molding and the crowning crest which like a bell tower on churches, guides the worshipers to the ceremonial center.

This one reminded us of the Grand Staircase Temple in Copan except this one did not have the elaborate story carvings found on that one.  It truly was as our guide told us, Copan is like Paris because of the fine carvings and Tikal is like New York because of the height of the temples.

There were some carvings but they were a bit more crude without the fine detail we had seen before in Copan.

One of the amazing things is that we could climb around on these tall temples and be up above the tree line.  This would not be possible on ruins in the states.

From up here we could see the top crests of four or five other temples poking up through the canopy.

This is the North Acropolis, the single most complete construction in terms of development and content, which has been excavated up to now in the Mayan region. Those little straw structures covered some carved stells that were weathering badly.

Besides the ancient ruins to see we enjoyed watching the antics of some monkeys high in the treetops.

It was rainy off and on all morning which made the clay-like soil very slick and slippery and there were tree roots always ready to trip us up.  We felt blessed that none of us fell down even though we slipped a few times.  The whole area was like a beautiful park and we enjoyed our explorations immensely.

As we were leaving the park, we came across this display of much more detailed corn husk dolls that were adorned with mushrooms, feathers, and tiny straw flowers for only Q10 each (about $1.25) so of course we had to end our day buying recuerdos.  I only bought one but wish now I had bought a whole bunch of them.  Aren't they adorable?

We thoroughly enjoyed our day tramping through the jungle exploring these ancient Mayan temples.  Not sure how they might connect with the Lamanites in the Book of Mormon but some of them were built around the same time.  We arrived walking about 9:00 and our feet finally gave out about 3:00, glad to head back to our hotel in Santa Elena.  We drove around and found a chapel to attend church in the next morning and then plan to head for Belieze.