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....