Childhood Love

 The sun did not shine.

It was too wet to play.

So we sat in the house

All that cold, cold, wet day.

Who doesn't know the opening lines to one of the most famous books of all time (at least in my world)? We are talking about “The Cat In The Hat”, of course. Springfield, Massachusetts decided that since Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel) grew up in Springfield, the right thing to do was to have a museum dedicated to him and his creations. The first floor was set up for kids. There were many of our favorites and the kids could touch and crawl and interact with them. The second floor was dedicated to telling us how little Theodor became Dr. Seuss. While the first floor made me laugh, I found the second floor to be more interesting.

The chandelier in the entryway made me laugh

Thing One and Thing Two!

Horton!

And we don't need any introduction

The Springfield museum complex consists of four museums located around a quadrangle. The D'Amour Museum of Fine Arts had a 'Van Gogh for All' exhibit. This exhibit used 21^st century technology to get visitors to interact with Van Gogh's art. For example, they had built rooms based on the paintings where you could walk into the room or you could manipulate a 12-foot-wide interactive version of “The Starry Night”.

I am constantly surprised at how many paintings by certain artists that I find all over the country. One of my favorite artists is William-Adolphe Bouguereau and lo and behold, here was another one of his paintings.

Young Girl
William-Adolphe Bouguereau

One of the more powerful exhibits was one called “Portraits in RED: Missing & Murdered Indigenous Peoples Painting Project” by Nayana LaFond. Indigenous women are eleven times more likely to go missing than the national average. 'Each portrait depicts a missing or murdered Indigenous person, a family member, or an advocate, rendered in shades of gray and marked by a vivid red handprint to raise awareness, inspire action, and honor the lives and stories of those impacted by this crisis.'

Joy in RED 2021
Nayana LaFond

Kimberly in RED 2020
Nayana LaFond

I stopped for lunch at the Crepes Tea House. As I'm sitting there, I get a text from my credit card company telling me that I have changed my password. Nope, I haven't. I looked at my account and somebody had cashed in my frequent flier miles to a tune of over $1,000. Whoa!!! I called my card customer service and they sent me right over to the fraud folks. They closed the account, refunded my miles and issued me a new card. Of course, I'm on the road for quite a few weeks and will not be home to get my new card. I do have other cards with me, but there go all those flier miles that I was planning on logging as I travel around the country. Oh well, I'm pretty lucky that that was the only damage done.

In my travels so far, it has done nothing but rain, rain, rain.  The upside of that is that I finally found a waterfall.  It was small and it was in my campground.