Kansas Bound--Day 3

Yesterday, Friday, was a day to greet old friends and get some errands done which included our usual trip to Walmart to pick up anything we forgot to bring. It was a beautiful day with great weather. Late in the evening the wind started to blow and continued all night. By this morning the wind had really picked up and blew all day. Could not afford to put our our big awning for shade, especially since we had just had it replaced after the wind tore it off the coach in West Texas two months ago.

This afternoon a bunch of us decided to go to the Kansas Salt Mine Museum. The actual museum is in an older part of a working salt mine, 650 feet below ground. Entrance to the museum is via a double decker elevator that drops very rapidly in total darkness. (The guide did say that if anyone had a problem with the dark that she could turn on the lights.) Once down to the museum (in the actual mine) there was a walking tour with several different tour guides telling us about the operations over the years. An interesting fact that all the equipment, regardless of size, had to be disassembled "top side" and brought down piece by piece and then reassembled. This included vehicles, machinery, loaders and salt moving equipment. A very monumental job.

After the walking tour, which ended with a visit to their gift shop, the group boarded a tram for the "dark tour". Although the lead car of the tram had head lights the other lights throughout this portion of the mine were turned off. As we came up on different places of interest the driver would trigger lights to come on for us. The current mine, including the museum part and the current mining area, was over 68 miles of tunnels all at the 650 below ground level. One stop on this part of the tour was at a salt pile where we were allowed off the cars to take a small sample of the salt. Small cloth bags were provided in which to carry our salt crystals. The salt that is currently being mined here is used for commercial purposes, mainly on the roads around the country during winter storms.

After our mine tour some of us drove over to the community of Yoder to shop in the Amish stores and then eat dinner. Unfortunately we arrived after 3:00 pm and, with it being Saturday, most of the shops were then closed. We did find one small bulk food store open so we were able to assist their economy by spending a few dollars on stuff we probably did not need. We really wanted to see the Yoder Hardware Store, which is semi famous in this area, but it closed at 3:00. We had dinner at the Carriage Crossing Restaurant in Yoder. This is a great Amish style eatery and had excellent food.