Council Grove, Kansas

my friend Susan has been trying to get me up to her lake house in Council Grove for two years. i finally made it in my last week in Kansas. Once we got up there, she gave me the grand tour of Historic Council Grove. It was a stop on the Santa Fe wagon trail. I saw the stump of an elm tree under which Custer once camped and a cave where a the hermit priest Father Francisco once lived for five months. (These are all on the Historic Driving Tour.) There were a couple of notable stops, though...

The Last Chance Store, the last place to buy supplies on the trail between here and Santa Fe:


The wagon ruts where the pioneers forded the Neosho River:

We went to Hays House, the oldest continually operating restaurant west of the Mississippi, for supper after a wicked storm chased us off the river:



Morris County, Kansas, has some of the most obliging insects i've ever photographed:




The lake was marvelous. We arrived in the late afternoon, and i promptly fell asleep reading on the porch. At sunset i took a series of photos over the water, and then the next day we swam for hours before heading back to Wichita:



i'm here until early Sunday morning, when the movers come to pick up my stuff and i head up to Illinois to stay a couple nights with my mother and visit Mark Twain's hometown of Hannibal, Missouri. Sao's in hog's heaven. With all the boxes stacked all over the apartment, it's like i've filled the place with cat furniture for her to climb around on. If i was worried about Sao being upset by all the packing, i shouldn't have been: