Travel Back in Time

Mark decided he wanted to travel back in time and see a couple of places he lived when he was a child.  So we headed out first for Miami, OK.  The only thing about Miami was that Mark couldn’t find anywhere that he used to live and nothing looked the same.  The town seemed to be a very sad area.  It just wasn’t like home at all.  The city streets weren’t nearly as nice as ours and everything seemed dirty.  (Hope no one is reading this that lives there.. but, oh, well, sorry about that).

So we spent the night there and headed out the next morning to Chanute, Kansas.  Here’s Mark and Kasey carrying their suitcases to the car.  I thought they were so cute, I had to take this picture.

 

We went through a town on the way to Chanute, called Picher, OK.  It was totally deserted, apparently it’s a toxic waste dump site.  I found this information on the town when I got back.  So very sad.   More here.  We had a town in Missouri that has been closed down, Times Beach – not far from St. Louis, this article is interesting.

Once we got into Chanute, we found a fairly big park centered around a lake.  It was really nice but had no bathrooms?  Can you imagine a city park with no bathrooms?  They may have been over at the ball fields, but we decided to head to Wal-Mart for a bathroom break and buy stuff for a picnic lunch.

We went down this little stairs…

 

 

to head toward the bridge…

 

I loved the rocks here…

As we crossed the bridge and Kasey looked down, he spotted this snake.  He’s got really good vision! 

 

Here’s the Santa Fe Train.  It was really neat.

Kasey liked it.  So did Daddy.

Kasey is holding his arm up and yelling “cho cho daddy!”

These were really big wheels.

This may have been Kasey’s first Merry Go Round.  He liked it.

This was an old waste water treatment plant that Mark and his family lived next to when he was little.  His dad had a mop factory in this building 40 years ago or so. 

This was the little school he went to.

This was one of the streets in Chanute.  I really liked the brick streets, there were a lot of them left in town.

So then we headed home.  Stopped at Fort Scott, Kansas.  This was pretty neat.  Most of the buildings are reconstructed. 

 

Cannons. 

Kasey said, ‘I’m hot, let’s go home!’  I agreed.  It was so nice to get home.  There is really no place like home.