Museum Crawl

  Field Trip Friday resumed today.  We were able to narrow our field of choices because we were going to pick up Daddy from the Kansas City Airport in the afternoon.  I found out that St. Joseph, MO had a "museum crawl" in August through mid-September so since we were looking at making a couple of trips in the near future to that part of the world we decided to join in!
  Our FTF companions Ducky and Gigi joined in the fun.  Boy am I glad that my folks are both retired and can come along!  It sure makes for twice the fun!  For the Crawl, you need complete 10 stops and answer 2 questions at each stop and you earn a small prize.  Our first choice was the Pony Express National Museum.  It was wonderful!  They gave us our Crawl booklets and a little magnifying glass.  Since we said we were homeschooling, she also told us to make sure and pick up a teacher packet at the end.  The museum starts with a 14 minute video on the Pony Express.  Shorty sat for a little of it and then waited expectantly to "go see the horses".

They weave you through the history of the Express and the trails in general.  Excellent displays with extra sensory things thrown in like lightning and heat and sounds.  Our favorite part was the well.  It was one that they had found while excavating the land prior to the museum building.  There was a display showing what artifacts they had found, but the big thing was there was a hand pump attached to the well and it worked!  The kids could pump water and look through a window in the floor to see down the well.  We had to circle back to this area a couple of times;)

the well

  As children of an archaeologist they also enjoyed the area that showed the ground beneath our feet from the excavations.  Bubby had a ball finding all the artifacts left in situ.

  The museum was just chalked full of wonderful kid interactive things.  The play area was great!  Mookie & Shorty stayed there for quite a while.

  This museum was top notch!  I would go back in a heartbeat.  It wasn't that big, but it was so interesting and well laid out!
   We took a lunch break and there are two things of note: 1) do not go to the NE side of St. Joe and expect to easily get to the NW side - not happening.  2) the Chick Fil-A there is the friendliest and most helpful fast food place I have ever been to.  Everything was answered with a "its my pleasure" and I didn't even have to carry the high chair for Shorty or get our own straws.  They waited on us hand and foot!
  Since we couldn't get to our planned stop easily (the nature center, it looks fabulous btw), we went to the NW Missouri Genealogical Society which was also on the Crawl.  Free to get in and well, we could look up family stuff while were were there too!  This was a big kid stop for sure, Bubby & Mookie worked on their research skills by looking up items for the questions in their booklet, Gigi looked up one of my scandalous ggg-grandpa George's marriages (more on him later), and Shorty looked up at Ducky and told him he wanted to go outside and they went for a walk.

  It didn't take long before Mookie (my more active learner) went and joined them, while Bubby took joy in finding more historical gems in the collections at the library.
  Pretty soon we had to take off to grab Daddy, so we climbed in the car for another new adventure - the airport!  We were able to watch the planes come and go for a while and then jumped around excitedly when Daddy walked through the gates (I won't tell you how much of a spectacle we made of ourselves;) ).  The real thrill was the luggage carousel.  I think Shorty was waiting for one of the Toy Story characters to come up the chute.

  Who knows where next week will lead us.  The kids are campaigning heavily to go back to St. Joe.  The really sweet thing was that one of the stops gave us our "prize" for completion of the Crawl a little early since we didn't know if we'd get to do them all in time.  I've been to St. Joe numerous times for family history research and loved it each time, but this time it won my heart as a tourist:) <3 br="">