Well, I guess I have 2 days’ worth of blogging to catch up on. I’ll see how much I can get through tonight.

First, an update on our night in Pittsburg, Kansas. We stayed the whole night at the City Park campground – no knock on the door during the night telling us to leave. When we looked out the window the next morning, there were only 3 spaces taken of the 12 spaces in the park. We’re still scratching out heads at the “No Vacancy” sign.

We got to the tire shop around 8 a.m., purchased a new tire, got it installed on the truck, got the spare tire put back in its rightful place under the truck, and were done shortly after 9. We are grateful for our safety on the side of the highway, for the two men who stopped to help us, and that we were able to find the right tire and get on our way so quickly. Now on to the rest of our vacation!

Not the kind of picture you want to take on vacation

 

We continued heading west in Kansas, but didn't drive too far before our first stop. Unlike yesterday, this was a planned stop. Our first "sightseeing" venture, if you will. We went to the Big Brutus Museum in West Mineral, Kansas. What is a Big Brutus, you might ask? A very good question. Big Brutus is a big shovel. Okay, there's a bit more to the story than that. Big Brutus is a big, like really huge, excavator. In fact it is the largest electric “shovel” in the world. It is the height of a 15-story building. When it was built in 1962, the parts were sent to Kansas by train, and it took 150 railroad cars to ship all the parts.

It was built for the coal mining industry here in southeastern Kansas. Big Brutus was used to clear away the “overburden" - dirt and rocks that covered the coal seams. After removing the overburden, the coal seams were easily mined. The bucket, or dipper as they call it, of the excavator is so huge that you can drive a pickup truck into it. We walked down to Big Brutus and wandered around the amazingly huge machinery, climbed up the narrow stairways to the different levels, maneuvered through the tiny passageways and doors, and even took a seat in the operator's chair.

Big Brutus was used from 1963 to 1974. When they were ready to retire it, they decided that it was too expensive to ship all the parts back, so they left it here in Kansas and now it is a museum. It is actually advertised as the "Biggest Attraction in Southeastern Kansas". Yep, a big shovel, the biggest attraction.

      

       

Our next stop was supposed to be Norman No. 1 Oil Well. This oil well is the site of one of the most significant oil discoveries in US and Kansas history. It was the first oil well west of the Mississippi to produce a commercial quantity of oil. I don’t know much more about it, because we didn’t make it to the Norman No. 1 Oil Well. We must have gotten distracted (or blinked) because we missed the turnoff to get there. By the time we realized we had missed the turnoff, we would have had to go 16 miles out of our way to get back to it. So we decided to skip it. It would have been interesting to see a museum about the oil fields of Kansas after seeing a museum about the coal industry. Oh, well.

The rest of our day was spent mostly driving, with one more stop near the end of the day. So we continued west through Kansas. As we travelled, we really began to feel like we were now in the west, as we encountered wide open spaces, gentle undulations in the topography, prairie grass and scrub brush, irrigation machinery, and views as far as the eye can see. You could see the gentle upward slope far out in front of us as we climbed in elevation from 945 feet to about 2200 feet. You could also notice how straight the road was out in front of us. The road was so straight, in fact, that the GPS said to go 193 miles and then turn right; 193 miles with no turns! And the right turn was into our campground.

It has been very hot on the high plains of the Midwest. Yesterday we hit 100; today we hit 108.

We stayed in an RV park in Greensburg, Kansas. So Tuesday night we stayed in Pittsburg, Wednesday night we stayed in Greensburg. After we got to our campground, we unhitched the trailer and then took in one more sight for the day. We drove to the Big Well Museum in Greensburg just down the road from our campground. The Big Well Museum houses the largest hand dug well in the world, and is billed as an "engineering marvel". The well was dug in the late 1800s in order to have a reliable water source for the surrounding area. The well was discontinued as a water source in 1932. There was a flight of circular stairs that you could climb down to the bottom of the well, and another flight of circular steps where you could climb to the top.  

   

Looking down

Looking up