How to Get Your Humble Blogger into a Museum

The original car from the Beverly Hillbillies TV show.

Jethro, Granny, Uncle Jed, and Ellie May with Miss Jane and Mr. Drysdale.

Start with a ambient outside temperature of nearly 100 degrees. Add the original car from the Beverly Hillbillies TV hit of the 1960s, and move out of the way as I come running through the door. While browsing the brochure for the history museum on the campus of the College of the Ozarks, just outside Branson, we discovered the museum holds the original car used in the Beverly Hillbillies show. The very same car Uncle Jed drove the family to Californy in after they struck it rich in oil. Besides the car, there are a lot of interesting exhibits in the museum, mainly related to the music industry in the area and local history. There is also a phenomenal taxidermy collection from butterflies, to birds, to a wide range of big game, including the 9 foot standing polar bear. Even so, if you don't make it past Uncle Jed's jalopy, it's still worth the visit.

Music in the Mountains

Presley's Country Jubilee was the original show in Branson, which today is home to more than 40 theatres.

We decided to break up the long drive between Santa Fe and Florida by spending a few days in Branson, MO. We'd heard a lot of good things about the place from numerous RVers over the years and decided to check it out for ourselves. We arrived in the middle of a heat wave so we figured the best way to beat the heat was to swim in the cool waters of Table Rock Lake, where our campground was located, and take in some of the matinee shows offered on the famous Branson "strip." One we didn't want to miss was Presley's County Jubilee. The Presley's were an Ozark’s family who played the underground stages of the Missouri hills. Folks from all over would pack the caves to hear their legendary family performances. So many, in fact, the caverns couldn’t hold’em anymore.So the Presleys left the caves and bought themselves a piece of land out on an isolated two-lane stretch of asphalt just outside of town. Wasn’t long after that when their show opened in a brand new theater --Branson’s original country music theater. The Presleys were a smash hit. People from across the country lined up every night for a chance to hear the country and gospel music the Presley family loved to perform.Pretty soon, other theaters started popping up around the Presleys and, as they say, the rest is history. Today, Branson is home to more than 40 stages and hosts performances by more than 150 acts. It's a great place to visit if you like good old-fashioned entertainment. But be warned -- the place has a serious traffic and parking problem. If you don't like crowds, this might not be the place for you.

Fire in the Hills

From our campground, we could see the fires burning in the distant hills.

When we arrived in Santa Fe on July 7th, the area was in the middle of one of its worst dry spells in decades. About one-tenth of an inch had fallen since the beginning of the year. And massive wildfires had consumed hundreds of thousands of acres in the hills just west of Santa Fe, including the largest fire which had prompted the temporary closing of the Los Alamos laboratory. With our campground located south of the fires and a brisk southerly wind blowing for the duration of our entire visit, we were spared the dense smoke the blanketed areas north of the city. The smoke did make for some dramatic sunsets as the sun set behind the rising plumes. Thunderstorms finally arrived during the last 2 days of our stay which really helped in bringing the fires under control but only a sustained period of rain will truly put them out for good.

The City of Churches

French Romanesque meets adobe at St. Francis Cathedral.

Santa Fe is known for its collection of historic churches and cathedrals and perhaps the city's most widely recognized and photographed is the St. Francis Cathedral. First built on its current site in 1714, the cathedral has undergone several renovations and reconstructions, but has remained an active place of worship since that date. The current structure dates back to the 1880s. The cathedral also houses La Conquistadora, a statue of Madonna that is recognized as the oldest in the United States, dating from 1625.

A Shiny Truck Finish that Costs Only Pennies!

The truck undergoing its re-finishing.

And no buffing required! It does, however, require a good amount of glue and a lot of, well... pennies. Our friends Mike and Heather have a neighbor, Ron, who lives on the other side of the mesa in southern Colorado. Some time back, Ron decided to re-finish his old pickup truck in Abe Lincolns. He painstakingly glued more than 12,000 pennies, all facing upright, to the body of the truck over several months. Not only had he created a conversation piece, but he increased the value of the truck by $120. As time went on, however, it seems Ron started leaving a trail of pennies along the unpaved mesa roads and in the driveways of the folks he visited. Instead of pennies from heaven, on the mesa it's pennies from Ron. Seems the initial batch of glue just wasn't up to the standards for keeping currency affixed to a moving vehicle. So, Ron is in the process of "re-finishing" the truck with what he hopes is a more effective adhesive.

Running the Mighty Arkansas

Record snowmelt in the Rockies has pushed many of rivers in the West to record high levels. The Arkansas River, which originates near Leadville, Colorado, and runs east through Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, before joining the Mississippi River, is no exception. In fact, the most popular whitewater rafting section of the Arkansas, the Royal Gorge near Canon City, Colorado, was closed for 23 days due to unsafe high water conditions. It just so happened that the river dipped below the unsafe threshold on the day we had reserved to raft the Gorge. Paula and I have rafted whitewater on numerous occasions, but the first section of the Royal Gorge on this trip was the most intense and challenging single stretch we have encountered -- and that includes the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. And the fact we were able to run the Gorge with my niece and nephew, and our friends Mike and Heather, made it a special day.

Your humble blogger in the front left seat getting ready to swallow a mouthful of ice cold Arkansas River water.

A Western Road Hazard -- Falling Cows!

I thought someone was playing a joke when we came across this road sign in the town of Red River. But it is an official New Mexico DOT sign erected to warn motorists that, in addition to rocks, cows could fall onto the road from the hills above. The hillside slopes are free-range grazed and some are quite steep. After rains they get really slick as well. In some states, cows have fallen directly onto cars. The more frequent occurrence is when cows slip off the hillside and fall onto the road injuring themselves, and cars run into them.

I'm not sure what a motorist is to do if a cow comes falling out of the sky.

A Train Ride into the Clouds

The spectacular view from the summit of Pike's Peak.

In 1976, on a trip to Arizona with my cousin, David, we passed through Colorado Springs and attempted to drive his American Motors Gremlin to the top of Pike's Peak. We never made it. Ever since, I've wanted to someday return and get to the top. Driving my truck was not going to work so the next best alternative was the Pike's Peak Cog Railway. What's a cog railway? Conventional railroads use the friction of wheels upon the rails, called "adhesion", to provide locomotive power. A cog, or rack, railroad uses a gear, "cog wheel", meshing into a special rack rail (mounted in the middle between the outer rails) to climb much steeper grades than those possible with a standard adhesion railroad. An adhesion railroad can only climb grades of 4 to 6%, with very short sections of up to 9%. A "rack" railroad can climb grades of up to 48%, depending upon the type of rack system employed.The ride up the 14,110-foot mountain took about an hour and provided a great 360-degree view of the surrounding area.

The awe-inspiring view from Pike's Peak was the inspiration for Katherine Lee Bates to compose "America the Beautiful."

The Yodeling Waitress

Liz Masterson, our server, whose voice
caused an avalanche -- or did it?

The White Fence Farm has been serving fried chicken dinners
in Lakewood, Colorado, since 1973.

A few posts back (Sweetheart of the Rodeo), I mentioned how you never know when you are in the presence of a celebrity. On our brief pass through the Denver area, we ran into another celebrity while having a great fried chicken dinner at the White Fence Farm. Liz Masterson was our server and she did a wonderful job, but it seems her talents lie in other areas. Liz also performs western and swing music in Denver and was featured on an episode of "Mythbusters" during the 2007 season. Seems she is quite a yodeler as well as a musician and the show needed someone to test a theory that yodeling could trigger an avalanche. You can check out the episode on YouTube to see if Liz was able to dislodge the snow from the mountain.

Geysers, Mudpots, Hot Springs, and Fumaroles

A roiling mudpot just north of the Lake area.

Those four features make up the vast array of geothermal features scattered throughout Yellowstone National Park. And the fire below the surface that is responsible for providing the fuel for these spectacular sights is a massive active caldera. A popular BBC special claims the caldera could erupt at any time, causing vast destruction and loss of life for hundreds of miles around the park. Geologists studying the caldera, however, believe a major eruption is many (hundreds or thousands) years away. Fear of meeting one's doom at Yellowstone does not seem to have frightened tourists from flocking to the geothermal areas, by far the most popular spots in the park.

The magnificent travertine terraces at Mammoth Hot Springs.

The most famous geothermal feature in Yellowstone -- Old Faithful.

Springtime in Yellowstone?

Springtime Yellowstone --Arrowleaf bitteroot along the Blacktail Deer Creek Trail

Winter Yellowstone -- Paula navigating the snowbanks along the Howard Eaton Trail.

That's the question we were asking ourselves for the first week we were in the park. According to a park ranger we spoke with, the park normally receives 120 inches of snow per year. This year, more than 300 inches fell in Yellowstone. And temperatures remained low enough to delay spring melt by 3 to 4 weeks. So, for the first week in the park, we were confined to hiking trails in the lower elevations where most of the snow had melted. Our attempts to hike trails in the Lake and Canyon areas met premature ends because of the impassable banks of  the white stuff still at the higher elevations.