John Brown Museum

We tried to do this three years ago. Well, three years and about three weeks, actually.



By 'this' I mean visit the John Brown museum in Osawatomie. It was closed last time we went, but fortunately it is in the middle of a big and relatively awesome park.





This time the museum was open, and it's not a ton to see, but it is cool. A fairly exhaustive project, in 1928 they moved the log cabin built by John Brown's brother in law to the site and then erected the stone building around it. Sometime after that they added climate control, so the cabin is indoors and ringed by ductwork.



You can climb the stairs to the loft and see what a creepy place that would be to retire to by candlelight. Not to mention how obviously miserable going to bed in winter would be.





People were short back then, too. I literally had to duck to avoid the ceiling beams in the main living area.



Seeing this as the comforts of home, you wonder what these people qualified as 'roughing it.' I suppose the answer is the time when you're building the cabin and you sleep out in the open with muscles worn to shreds from cutting and stacking logs with hand tools.



I didn't mean for this to turn into a road trip. But I thought we were pretty close to Burlington and I wanted the girls to see the spectacle that is the Wolf Creek reactor. Back when I was in high school you could all but drive up to the dome unmolested. That's not true anymore.



In this 'post 9/11 world,' as the saying goes, you can't get close enough to get a decent photograph before you get to a checkpoint and a sign noting prohibitions against everything from firearms to unauthorized photography. I doubt this makes us any safer from terrorists, I really do.



Not that I'd want to offer any ideas to evil men, but the petroleum tank field we passed on the way out of Osawatomie would be a more likely target. Nuclear power plants are complicated things. Even if you could beat the security, where do you go to get the dangerous stuff and then how do you get it without frying yourself right there on the premises? I don't know and I doubt any Al Queda types do either.



The pipeline station, on the other hand has about the security I recall nuclear power plants having back when I was in high school: a chain link fence with some barbed wire up top. On the other side of that fence is enough BTU's worth of highly combustible fuel to make a mini-Armageddon on the prairie.

As I say, I'm not making any suggestions to asshead Islamists, but if one person can think of it, other, more violent people can too.



Saw some cool folk art on our little side-track. As I say, I thought Burlington was closer to Osawatomie. After I'd driven a bit I stopped and bought a map. Found out Burlington was a lot further south than I remembered, but on the flip side, we were already due east of it since we'd gone further south than I had realized.



So go west, young man, right? In LeRoy, we found boots on a tree, a wagon-plane, cool murals on windows of an old building.





In Burlington itself, asking directions to the reactor, I learned of a bald eagle nest locals are excited about. I guess 'the old man' took a powder for awhile after his mate bit the dust, and he's back with a new bride. You can't tell it from my picture, but I could see a white head bobbing about in the massive nest.



We also got down close to the river in Burlington, where there is apparently good fishing but if you hear the siren, you best abandon your post as the water is about to rise. According to the signs anyway.