Day Three: More on Oz
We got the hell out of Dodge around noon yesterday (sorry, I couldn’t resist). I’ll tell you about our time there, but first I want to fill in some details about our visit to Liberal and our drive north on Wednesday…
After the Larrabees dropped us off at our motel and we said goodbye to our new friends, we drove over to a laundromat so Jim could dry the clothes he washed the night before. He had attempted to do this in the microwave in his room, but it hadn’t worked out too well for him. Once his clothes were dry, we drove over to the newly restored Rock Island Line Depot for lunch. Then it was off to the Coronado Museum, which is in a house that was built by Henry Larrabee’s son, Lee, in 1918. The big draw at the museum complex is Dorothy’s House, which wasn’t in the Wizard of Oz movie, but the folks in Liberal have furnished it to resemble a typical farmhouse from that era. The pantry featured a an old pressure cooker that looked like a cartoon bomb.
After Dorothy’s House, our tour guide, Gary, led us to a building that houses five thousand square feet of animated Oz magic. According to him, the exhibit was donated to the museum by an elderly couple who had enjoyed recreating scenes from Frank Baum’s stories in diorama. He also said that normally the museum has high school girls who dress up like Dorothy to lead the tour, but he was filling in since they were in school at the time (we did get to see one of these girls a little later). After the tour, we went back to the main museum. Gary, who is a local historian and former eighth grade teacher, didn’t know a lot about Henry either, so Jim shared some of the information he’s gathered.
We headed north to Dodge City in the afternoon and stopped at a couple roadside attractions along the way. The best one was a hideout used by the Dalton Gang. The guy who ran the place was not only knowledgeable about the Daltons, but western history in general.
OK, it looks like I’m not going to have time to write about Dodge City this morning, but I will tonight. We have to cover a lot of ground today and should land somewhere in Wyoming tonight.
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