Day Five, Columbia Missouri to Emporia Kansas - 250 miles, High temp 102.

This could have been a short day, but for the exit ramp that caught my eye as we were approaching Kansas City,  not long after our departure from Columbus: "Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, Next Right." Joy, at the wheel,  deftly darted across three lanes of 75 mph traffic to successfully make the turn.

The Truman Museum (we didn't visit the library or the Truman home) was first rate. A handsome building on a hilltop, with an enclosed courtyard (including the graves of Harry, Bess, daughter Margaret and her husband). We were greeted by a tour guide who treated us as his special charges, gave us a thorough indoctrination, and sent us through a beautifully designed fact-filled series of displays, starting with a movie on Truman's upbringing, his courtship and marriage, army experience in World War I, and entry into politics, up to Roosevelt's death and his accession to the Presidency.

We then took a walking tour through a series of separate rooms and corridors, each highlighting a key episode in Truman's career with excellent audiovisual presentations and a fair amount of detail. Of course the purpose was to present Truman in the most favorable light, but there was subtlety as well. Not all accomplishments were heralded as perfect, and here and there opposing viewpoints were given room.

All in all, not bad. I haven't seen enough Presidential libraries to make a comparison; I suppose all of them are guilty of excessive lionizing, but as an educational presentation the Truman Museum should get high marks. America's immediate postwar history is fading from memory. It was good to see a serious effort at keeping it alive. One of the last exhibits depicted America in 1952 through dozens of Life magazine covers and other visuals and a lovely rendition of a torch song by Ella Fitzgerald.

The day started badly back in Columbia. I went out to the car from our Quality Inn room to find something and left it unlocked for a few minutes as I went back in our room to get something. Joy recalls seeing a group of teenagers passing by.  When I went back to the car, something was funny: the driver's door was not latched, and on the driver's seat was a small notebook I remembered putting in the console between the seats, on top of a removable tray full of coins. Under the tray was our GPS and several chargers for various gadgets. When I lifted the cover, the tray and coins were gone. But everything else was intact. Our suitcases were untouched, the CDs were still in the glove box, and there didn't seem to have been any effort to rummage through anything else in the car. So we were out maybe $2.50 in small coins, and a cheap plastic tray. Still, it was an annoying violation.


I didn't mention yesterday that the Quality Inn staff did a splendid thing for Independence Day: they put on a barbecue dinner for "Veterans, staff, and guests." We feasted on hot dogs, hamburgers, bratwursts, potato salad, watermelon and cake, and much enjoyed mingling with the staff and other guests.

The Inn has an unusual layout: Rooms are laid out in a large hollow square, with clerestory windows all around, overlooking an inner court which features the breakfast bar, a large amoeba-shaped (whatever that is) swimming pool, a bathhouse with showers and saunas, and a small forest of fairly large trees (in need of watering). Anticipating noise from the courtyard, we picked an outside room on the ground floor.

Aside from the thieves, it was a five-star experience.

The other excitement of our trip was that just outside Kansas City Carmen, our Garmin GPS, inexplicably started speaking German! I couldn't find how to change her language back to English without restoring all the original configuration, which of course wiped out all our navigation data. (Looking up the problem using Google on my iPhone, I discovered this happens not only with Garmins but TomToms as well. And it's always in German, not French, Spanish or Japanese). But I got Carmen back to speaking English again before we had to rename her Helga.

Tomorrow: Lots more Kansas.