I woke up on the morning of the third day with more of a plan about the state. These vacations always have a bit of a rhythm to them as I get my bearings and figure out how to manage time. Two days in, I was finally hitting my stride in Kansas.
So Tamu and I headed back Lake Shawnee, and walked in the opposite direction from the same parking area, 
with little but ducks for company. It was going to be another hot day, and I planned to retrace some steps from Day 2, so I could only hope that we would find a way to keep him comfortable in the heat. Incidentally, I had borrowed a CD of Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley for this year’s entertainment and got about half way through. Since he started at Labor Day in the northeastern US, I have not gleaned any travel tips from it for keeping a dog comfortable during hot summer travel yet. Still, a better choice than In Cold Blood.
Our first stop was Old Prairie Town at Ward-Meade Park, my first experience of the Kansas of western settlement. I was delighted to find a park with a collection of turn-of-the-20th-century buildings, so I could roam with 
Tamu there. The collection includes a church, log cabins, an old depot, physician’s office, drug store with working soda fountain, general store, and other buildings moved to the site as Topeka grew into the 20th century. The general and drug stores are both open for visitors, and the soda counter sells a range of ice cream treats. Tamu made some friends outside while the soda jerk made a delicious peanut butter 
and chocolate shake for me to take on the road. The Old Prairie Town is adjacent to Ward-Meade Park, which appears to be a historic home from the same era which was then on the outskirts of Topeka. I did not take tours of either of these places because of the timing of our visit, but both the soda jerk (I use the term with affection because my father’s first job in the 1940’s was as a soda jerk, which meant that we stopped at a lot of ice cream parlors when we vacationed as a family) and the general store clerk were happy to answer questions.
The woman staffing the general store struck up a conversation with me at the end of our visit, and when she learned that I had visited the Brown v. Board National Historic Site the day before, she asked me if I wanted to see the corresponding school for whites that had been the subject of the lawsuit as it was in the surrounding 
neighborhood. Of course. Sumner School was where the Brown family attempted to enroll their daughter in the 1950’s, but were denied because it was whites only. It later desegregated as a result of the Brown decision, then closed in 1996, was named to the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Sites in 2008, was sold to the True Foundation World Outreach Ministries in 2009, and sustained fire damage in 2015. It remains boarded up and in disrepair. Information about its fate can be found on the website for the National Historic Site.
From there, we headed to Prairie Fire Winery in Paxico. I am always delighted to see wineries along the way across the US, and I wonder if that’s a project I would ever take on in retirement. They seem to always be thriving. I was not the only visitor that day, and there was a grad student from Kansas State being trained during my tasting, so this one must be doing a good enough business to support employees. Anyway, I put away my retirement plans, found Tamu a spot in the shade, and enjoyed a selection of their wines and conversation. They offered advice about the rest of the state. It seems I was seeing the most populous part of Kansas. In fact, from what I could see the night before, there were a lot of small things to see throughout the state, but they would involve long drives to isolated spots, followed by long drives on to the next place. This is one of the dilemmas of traveling in the US: vast distances to cover and no correspondingly vast time off work to see them.
I left next for Wamego and The Wizard of Oz Museum. The day had again turned hot, so I went in and asked how long the tour would take because I could not keep a dog in the car. The staff person invited him into their office while I visited, which made his day. The museum contains exhibits about the book and movie, with life size mannequins of all the major characters. It also has a small movie theater that plays the film non-stop. I stopped in and caught the early section when the town meanie takes Toto away from Dorothy to be 
euthanized. I was glad Tamu was safely inside their air conditioned office! The gift shop was quite extensive as well. Tamu and I headed back out into the heat and walked up and down the store fronts of Wamego, but we were not enticed by a second winery, yellow brick road, or the recommended boot shop. I needed to press on to Abilene and take up Eisenhower’s story where I had left off the day before.
So I landed back in Abilene. I leashed Tamu to a tree in a shaded area and 
left his water dish, and headed back to the Presidential museum. The head of security was standing there when I arrived, so I asked him if Tamu would be okay there and he offered to go check on him. So I walked through displays of 1950’s American life, wondering how much of the relative peace and prosperity was the result of the President’s leadership and how much was simply good timing. The museum posits the question, arguing that Eisenhower’s leadership provided the stable circumstances that would later give way to the upheavals of the 1960’s. I learned about the Eisenhowers’ retirement to Gettysburg and watched a Barbara Walters interview of Mamie in her widowhood.
Because I had seen so much the previous day, we headed out after this run through the last part of the museum. There is a museum of cosmology and space center in Hutchinson that is highly recommended, so we headed in that direction expecting to see a lot of it as it is open into the evening. Along the way, I planned to stop in Salina to eat but as we passed through, I was not terribly hungry, so we kept going. We hit a stretch of state route just outside Hutchinson on the way to the space center, and I happened to notice that it was named for Ken Kennedy. I wondered what local retired politician had a repeating name when it dawned on me, with a kind of sickening sadness, that I was familiar with Ken’s story and he wasn’t a local politician, but a police officer killed in the line of duty who left behind a young widow, Anita, who later became my friend. I had always thought they were from Wichita, but now I realized that Anita probably always described Hutchinson as being near Wichita, and since I could place neither on a map until this very day, the two had become one in my mind. I met Anita some 20 years after Ken was shot dead by a woman during an arrest, when Anita and I were both on a course for missioners returning from Africa.
I reached the space museum, but they could not suggest a comfortable place for Tamu to wait while I visited, and the museum was extensive. They were able to confirm 
that the highway was named for a fallen police officer and directed me to the town’s main police station to see if there was a memorial. So I headed there, and learned that Ken is their only line of duty fatality, so a memorial hangs on a wall in the front of the building. He was 23 when he died; I believe he and Anita–high school sweethearts–had been married less than a year. She has never remarried, and eventually left Hutchinson to make a life in Denver and, after that, West Africa. What made this even more devastating to me was the day it happened. Throughout the week I had been vacationing, there had been considerable turmoil happening across the country. Two more unarmed black men had been killed by police at the start of the week, and their killings had been videotaped, posted online, and gone viral. As a result, there had been huge marches and protests in cities across the US. The night before, during one such peaceful march in Dallas, a sniper had shot into the crowds, targeting police who had joined the peaceful protesters. As of that morning, five police were dead in Dallas, and seven others wounded in the worst day of police killings since 9/11. It was increasingly hard to escape the mounting sadness and horror happening in the rest of the country from my vacation bubble. Now here I was, unexpectedly at Ken’s memorial, knowing the toll his death took on his widow, with the flags again at half mast outside, wondering how many pointless deaths would happen, and if the summer would burn out of control. We seemed to be living in a nightmare of unending violence, and the sadness was inescapable.
Tamu and I took a little walk around Hutchinson. It is a charming town, but I was worn out and wanted to find a hotel in Wichita before it got dark outside. I decided to skip the space center to see what Kansas’ largest city had on offer. But first, we needed a clean place to rest and do laundry. So we pressed on to Wichita.