We were in Missouri in the Fall of 2004. As with other places in the Midwest, there was more to explore than expected. And once again, we stayed a longer than originally planned. Most surprising was how much we enjoyed all of the museums. Over the years we've visited too many community museums that are really really bad. We've seen enough collections of donated — and dusty — memorabilia to last the rest of our lives. So one of us always pretends to be sorry that we don't have time to turn off at every museum sign we see in every community we pass through.
But all of the ones we visited in Missouri were fun to visit and provided painless learning experiences.
In St. Joseph, we visited the Oregon Trail Museum at the Trail's starting point.. A personal connection to the Trail made this tour especially interesting.
As a small girl, Bill's great-grandmother was on one of the last wagon trains to come from Missouri to the "Far Northwest" (as it says on the sign). We've walked on wagon ruts on the Oregon part of the trail (near Baker City) and it was thought-provoking to be where these ancestors' long journey started. (We do not know of any family members who stayed in Missouri. There probably are some.) This great-grandmother lived until Bill was eleven or twelve and he remembers her stories well. She told him she walked the trail twice because she would run a ways ahead to get rid of her excess energy and then run back and hop on the wagon. We used to wish we could do something like that with kids on long car-camping trips.
The Pony Express Museum is also in St Joe and also well worth a visit.
Our next stop was Kansas City, where we toured the remarkable Arabia Steamship Museum. River transportation was vital to commerce back in frontier days. In 1856, the Arabia steamboat, which was delivering supplies to frontier settlers, hit a snag and sank in the Missouri River. At the time, there was no way to rescue the ship (the crew all escaped). Eventually, the River changed course and the wreckage was buried in the dirt. Over 130 years later, a couple of brothers from Missouri got interested in the story and began studying the wreck and mapping the probable river path from back then. They found the boat buried in the middle of a Kansas cornfield. They got the remains and the barrels and crates of supplies dug up. They have become experts in fresh-water restoration. It is amazing to see the collections of materials that were lost with the ship and then recovered.
Here is the museum website: http://www.1856.com.
You really get two stories for the price of one here. Not only he story of the boat and the look at all the necessities that were lost to the frontier settlers when she sank but also the remarkable story of the people determined to find the boat and how they learned to save and share the contents. That family owns and runs the museum and we got to meet one of the brothers during our tour.
In Independence, now a part of the greater Kansas City Area, we visited the home of Harry and Bess Truman. They lived there before he became president (it was actually Bess's childhood home), and, after his terms of office, lived out their remaining lives there. It was a simple, unpretentious home, even for that time, when most ordinary peoples' homes were way simpler than they are today. The Trumans never really updated it at all. Worn-out old linoleum on the floor, old toaster on the old wooden kitchen table…being an ex-president back then was not a lucrative proposition. The guide at the Truman home told us that Harry and Bess never wanted any of the artifacts from his presidency at their home — they wanted their home to stay the same as it was before they went to Washington.
The mementos are displayed at the Truman Visitor Center/Library. The displays, films, and exhibits provided an excellent overview of this presidency and the history of that important era. We could easily have spent days there.
President Truman was famous for walking all over. All of the street signs in Independence have a silhouette of him strolling the streets of town.
For a different kind of learning (!) experience in Kansas City, we visited two famous barbeque joints — Arthur Bryant's and KC's. Both of these are chains now, but we went to the original hole-in-the-wall restaurants. The food was good and these visits gave us a chance to learn some more history of the area and see a couple of different neighborhoods in the inner city.
From Kansas City, we went to Hannibal where we stayed at the Mark Twain Caves RV Park. The park is located near the cave that Mark Twain is said to have visited and written into his story (the Becky Thatcher cave). From Old Town Hannibal, we took the Mark Twain River Boat Excursion for beautiful views and an overview of river history from the guide. The next day we toured Sam Clemons' boyhood home and a museum in the old Hannibal drugstore
Missouri was a fun state to visit and we learned that some museums are definitely worth visiting.
As if the surrounding mountains are not enough to feast your eyes upon, there are two beautifully done sculpture gardens in the town of Loveland. A visit to either garden makes a very enjoyable afternoon. It's lovely to stroll around viewing the art and gardens while enjoying the fresh mountain air. Much better than a stuffy museum (and much more likely to be visited — by us, at least.)
The Chapungu Sculpture Park is newer. This garden is at the edge of town, near a new and "upscale" shopping center. The park was built and the sculptures purchased by the shopping center developer and (as far as we could figure out) it is managed jointly by the development corporation and the city. This park has contemporary fine art by Zimbabwean sculptors. Telling stories through carvings is a tradition in that country. The landscaping in this newer garden is more natural grassland, which I imagine is rather like that of the sculptors' homeland. 
