More guests and almost tornadoed!

Guest no 3 arrives. Our lovely son, determined to have the full mid-west experience. He has had a week of West Coast fun and frivolity, it's time for the real thing!

He is very impressed with the museum, and Wren church and amused by our down town position; handy for pizza, a hair cut all that Fulton has to offer. He is his father's son. Walmart is a big hit with it's T shirts, jeans and hats, which are far cheaper than back home. We end up buying a second suitcase so he can take it all back. I am also hoping to squeeze a few of our things in, but at this rate there will be no room.
We visit Ozarkland- a must for any visitor. Skomer gets a few questionable items- a rebel hat and the like. I buy a plastic, painted, golden eagle money box. Who could resist? Judging by Roland's face, he could have.

Since we were last in the USA micro breweries have proliferated. Between them, father and son are doing their best to taste the lot! Here are a few of the empties.

We visit Crane's store. An old fashioned country store with food and clothes. More clothes are bought.

We have a night on the razz in Fulton with the archivist. Beer, bar football, pool and pin ball machines, then on to a fairly revolting meal at a bar in town. It's fun, but the son and heir is not impressed with our knowledge of the local bars. He has to find out where they all are from the shoe shop owner, who is a Fultonite.

We have a trip to Jeff City and get a private tour of the Capitol. See, we do know some of the right people.
We are getting to know this building very well, but it impresses each time. This is a mini version of Washington, well not that mini. The House is in session and there is a real buzz about the place. I am very impressed again with the openness of the place. No security barriers, x-rays or the like. We mingle with the state's representatives. Very refreshing. It's how a democracy should be.

 We get to see inside the dome. This gives you some idea of the scale of the place.

 and get to go up on the roof for a view over the Missouri and beyond.

We are on flood alert. The water is high. There have been quite a few storms and more are expected. There are also lurking tornadoes.

The next experience is shooting. This time indoors with hand guns. A new experience. I have been recommended a place, whose website urges us to exercise our 2nd amendment rights! A friend takes us for our first go with hand guns

We get a bit of advice as to what to choose and start with three very different guns. Skomer feels he has to try a magnum. Wonder why! I end up with one that looks like an old fashioned cowboys gun, a 22. It has very little kick back, which is more than you can say for the magnum.  Our friend chooses a Glock 9mm with a bit of a kick in it. They are all heavy. We all get a box of bullets , ear protection, which is essential and eye protection. Then we get to choose targets. We are now ready for the range.




Some of the targets you can choose might be considered to be non PC and their description in the shop certainly is.

We find that we are pretty good at killing the enemy and defending the country from terrorists and the like! We can hit the bits we want to hit.

Someone felt the need to try an even bigger gun!!!! and is rather pleased with the results.

It is an interesting 2 hours. Long enough to realise it is pretty easy to kill someone with a lethal weapon in your hand and an ability to aim vaguely in the right direction. You don't need any practice. We have a fellow shooter several lanes away happily obliterating the figure of a man with bullet cases flying in all directions.
A fun experience as well as a worrying one. It makes me think no one should ever be able to own a hand gun and have it in their home. These guns held up to 14 bullets in one magazine. Lethal. Far too easy to use if you lost it and felt like having a go at someone.

We leave the charms of Fulton behind and set out for the big city. We have tickets for a Cardinals match and a tour of the Budweiser factory, the biggest brewery in the world! Now you have to see that.
The drive to St Louis is in torrential rain and the forecast is not good.
We do a quick trip into the downtown. Skomer has to see the arch and the sun comes out especially.

There are tornado warnings further south and to the east and we sit down to a very nice meal in Clayton, with lightening and thunder and all mayhem being let loose outside. We are unaware that as we happily chomp away on scallops and the like, the main international airport in St Louis is getting a direct hit by a tornado. Skomer is due to fly out sunday morning. Panic sets in.
We are going with St Louis friends to the Bud factory and the match and he kindly lets us use his office so that Skomer can change his flight to leave from Kansas City, the other side of the state! We still have the day to enjoy, so it's beer first.

The Bud factory is enormous and has a lot of it's original victorian buildings and artefacts.

The interior is also interesting.

The production is phenomenal and at the end of the tour you get to have a couple of half pints of any of their products. Bud on tap at the factory tastes pretty good. I think we are all getting in the mood for the match.














Our friends have got us brilliant seats, with a really good view of the game. When you first enter you just see a mass of red and white and the arch and towers of down town St Louis. Very impressive.

The weather is holding......just. It's warm. The wrong sort, you know there's going to be more rain.

The game is between arch rivals the Cardinals, the St Louis local team and the Cincinnati Reds. Last year when they met it all ended in a punch up. One of the Cincinnati players is supposed to have kicked one of the Cardinals in the head and not surprisingly, is not very popular. Every time he comes out, the crowd stands and boos, in a fairly good natured way. It doesn't seem to put him off his game and his team wins.

This is Skomer attempting to explain the finer points of the game to his father! Our friends are very impressed that Skomer's knowledge of the game is excellent and he has the shirt and hat, thanks to Walmart. He is described as 'one of the guys'. He certainly doesn't look out of place.

We do! Roland and I noticeably not red. I have got red sandals on though.
Having never been that enthralled by the game on television, I have to say watching it live was a lot better and the atmosphere in the stadium was great. We drink more beer, eat hot dogs and nachos and generally it's an all american experience.
Then, unfortunately we have to leave. The drive to Kansas City is 250 miles + and Roland wants to do half of it tonight. So we go back to Fulton for a few hours sleep. The drive is in torrential rain but the next morning, the sun shines and the drive to Kansas City is easy, if somewhat dull.

Skomer get's off safe and sound only to be delayed by storms in Washington. I think he had a pretty good time. We are exhausted and just have enough time to get ready for offspring number 2. Caelia and Ben fly in this saturday. They want the full Missouri experience too.

Before they come we have our own version of the royal wedding at the museum. We are all going to dress up, wear hats, drink champagne and eat cake! A bit of fun and frivolity. The weather is still stormy, there are still tornadoes and floods, but Fulton has survived to party on- so far.

Spring arrives and so do visitors. Topeka and it's delights!

There is suddenly a feel of spring around. In the matter of a week the temperatures have regularly been hitting the 90's.
 Trees have blossomed.

 Bulbs appeared from nowhere and birds are suddenly very active.

This is the bright red male cardinal.
 My two redbud trees in the garden are a glorious mass of purply pink flowers and my seemingly empty garden has large patches of tulips and daffodils.

It has been lovely to be able to show people the many delights of Fulton and beyond in the sunshine. Having said that, delightful they may be, but they don't take long!

This is the bit of Berlin wall. One feels obliged to do this photo with all guests!
Then there is the walk round Stinsons Creek, which is turning green and pretty.

We have done the usual circle with the last two guests- Jefferson City for the Capitol.

This is Justice depicted in stain glass inside the Chamber of the Capitol.

 Herman for the Missouri, beer and wine with German heritage, then back to Fulton. Wildly exciting as you can imagine.
Roland was very pleased to have another enthusiast to enjoy the local trains. This one is going along the flood plain of the Missouri river going towards Herman from Jefferson city.

The flood plain is rather bleak and the houses are now empty. People live above the potential water level. The remains are rather romantic, stuck out in the middle of nowhere, with remnants of a garden amongst the grass.

On one of the back roads we come across a treasure trove of old cars. A man, who does them up in his shed and has literally hundreds spread over the hills around for the spare parts. As he pointed out there are no zoning laws in this county. He is very friendly and quite happy for us to wander round.

There are fields full of cars with cows feeding amongst them. You could have spent a long time taking photos.

The weather is perfect. Blue skies, hot, but not too hot. The porch comes into it's own. Icy cold champagne on a shaded porch, now you can't get better than that.

Our guests head off south and we drive west into Kansas to a conference in Topeka. The temperature drops dramatically and there is torrential rain all the way.
 The Ramada, Topeka is a particularly depressing hotel. Huge and ageing with a lot of brown and beige decors. Topeka does not impress. The weather doesn't help, but it looks pretty dull when the sun comes out the next day.
This is my first conference. It is the Midwest Victorian studies annual conference. English seems to dominate over history and I find most of the papers a lot of waffle about nothing very much. The title of the conference is 'Victorian environments: spaces, places, traces.' which gives you some idea. One of the papers is entitled 'The bedroom as male space for anxiety in Dickens's Lying Awake' another 'The train as spatio-temporal dislocation in Gaskell's North and south'. I know why I never did English and was never any good at it.
The best part of the conference is the end, when we are invited to several houses in the most attractive, Victorian part of Topeka- Potwin. A suburb of large, beautiful houses with big gardens, mature trees and brick roads. Perhaps I've been a bit unkind to Topeka.

Sunday morning we manage to get into the First Presbyterian Church to see the complete set of Tiffany glass windows. They are very beautiful. Lovely shades of blue and green.

My photos don't really do them justice, but it's a shame Tiffany didn't do more church windows.

We pick up Skomer from Kansas City airport and head on home. The drive is a rather dull one. The road is straight and there is nothing much to keep you awake. We are going to have to do this drive again in a couple of weeks. We are hitting two presidential libraries. Eisenhower's in Kansas, where Roland is giving a lecture and Truman's in Independence, Missouri. We think it's a lot of driving. It's nothing to American's.

Skomer is delighted with Fulton. We are under tornado watch again. Everyone in town is phoned with the warning. Television and radio have bulletins and it would be hard not to know you were under threat. They have been particularly bad this year with 42 deaths so far. The Carolinas have had the worst of it. Missouri gets a few in the east and the Cardinals match in St. Louis has to be cancelled.
Skomer wants to have the full on, hick/redneck experience. It's a bit hard in the four days he has here, but we will do our best! We have even managed to find a source of moonshine at his request and are going be getting lessons in shooting hand guns at Ammo Alley. Details later....