Soul Rejunification

I leave Fort Wayne and head sort of east to the little town of Wapakoneta, Ohio, the birthplace of Neil Armstrong. That is not why I am here, Wapakoneta is the home of the Temple of Tolerance. The name itself has called me here. It is located in the back yard of a small suburban home. Or so you think. You go through the gates and it actually takes up most of the block. I was amazed at how you could wander thru all of these pathways and they just went on and on.  I found visiting the Temple very peaceful and meditative.

“Jim Bowsher’s master work is undoubtedly The Temple of Tolerance. Developed as a refuge for young people battered by dysfunctional family dynamics or other destructive relationships, Jim spent nearly two decades moving and precisely placing innumerable rocks, many massive, along with other ornamental features, to construct the Temple grounds. The meandering pathways surrounding the central Temple reveal countless surprises, including a cottage built in the shape of a barrel, the door from a jail cell that once held members of the Dillinger gang, and peaceful alcoves for rest and meditation.

Jim has called The Temple “The physical manifestation of a philosophical concept—more a state of mind than a place.” The Temple’s role in the surrounding community embodies Jim’s guiding belief that all people are born with a natural capacity for goodness. ” From Jim Bowsher's website

The Temple of Tolerance

In This Tube Is One Shell Casing For Each American -
Military Man And Woman From Ohio Who Died -
In A War from 1812 to ... 

One of the pathways

View from the top of the Temple.
There were many shrines to various people and causes.  This one reads:
The Broken Chain of Enslavement To Self-Centered Self Serving Bigoted Beliefs

Many seating areas - I read that on weekends, many musicians show up and jam

I belong to an organization called Harvest Hosts (HH). HH has contracted with various businesses and farms to allow RVers to stay for one night. Besides the yearly membership fee, it is free to camp at these sites. You are supposed to buy something at the Host and you can only stay one night. The first one I stayed at was Der Dutchman, which is an Amish Restaurant. This is not going to be good. I spent way too much on eating dinner and breakfast in the restaurant and also buying a few little souvenirs.

I moved on to Sand Hollow Winery. It was a lovely stay, again I spent way too much on wine and pizza. This is not a cost saving way to travel. What was cool about Sand Hollow was that it is located on 80 acres and there are trails meandering thru the woods. We were there on a Saturday and they had a musician (Mark Camden) playing. Mark plays Native American flutes which do not have the brassy sound of flutes as we know them, they are a mellow peaceful sound. As Miko and I wandered thru the trails, the flute music drifts out and it was such a soul healing experience.

 

The Fort

 

Here we go again.

First off, a few administrative details. I was using something called Feedburner which would send out emails to you whenever I updated the blog. Google decided to discontinue that feature and I had to find something else. So, I am now using follow.it. I am hoping that the transition is smooth and no hassle to anybody. We shall see as this particular entry is my first use of follow.it.

When we last spoke, I had mentioned that there were repairs that needed to be done to my camper. I called a local dealer and I soon realized that they did not have it together. I decided that I might as well take it to the manufacturer, Grand Design, in Middlebury Indiana. Some of the repairs are major and who better to fix it, then the people who made the camper.

I loaded up my truck (minus Jogger and Miko) and headed to Indiana. I spent the night at an Elks lodge in Janesville, WI. I have never seen a parking lot as uneven as this one. It was like one of those giant slides they have in amusement parks, all wavy and twisted. I did not want to put my slides out because my camper was so unlevel that it would have really messed up the slides.

After dropping off the camper, I made it to my brother's house outside of Chicago. It was nice seeing him and his partner, they fed me, they housed me and they even fed my Junior Ranger obsession. There is a new National Monument in Chicago – The Pullman National Monument. It is a really new monument, only designated as a monument in 2015 by President Obama and the grand opening was September 2021. Given my history of scheduling mishaps, this was amazing that I was in the right place at the right time.

George Pullman founded the Pullman Palace Car Company to build luxury train sleeping cars. The park tells the story of one of the first planned industrial communities in the United States, the sleeping car magnate who helped create it, and the workers who lived there. The district is significant for its influence on urban planning and design, as well as its role in American labor history, including the 1894 Pullman Strike and Boycott. (NPS website)

The Administration Building - this is about all that is left of the Pullman factory

You could worship however, whoever you wanted just as long as it happened in the Green Church

Eventually, I picked up the camper. I had to have the floor replaced and to do that, they had to remove the slides. Major deal. My floor is now beautiful. They also fixed my front baggage door, the one I might have backed my pickup tailgate into. I love Grand Design, the manufacturer of my rig. There were a few wires that had to be reattached after I left the Service Center – I had to call a mobile tech, but Grand Design said that they will pick up the tab. I love Grand Design.

An Indiana sunset

So, now I'm officially back on the road. First stop – Fort Wayne Indiana. It is the home of the 2^nd largest genealogy library in the United States. I spent a day in the library looking up ancestors and realized my heart wasn't in it. I could be out exploring and so I did. I stayed at the Johnny Appleseed Campground where, it just so happens, is Johnny Appleseed aka John Chapman's grave.  

Across the street was the St. Joseph river.  Quite turbulent, it had been raining

Mid-America Windmill Museum in Kendallville, Indiana. I was pleasantly surprised at how interesting this was. Between 1865 and the 1930's, there were 94 windmill producers in the Kendallville area. They had a short movie explaining windmills and then you go into an 1899 barn that was built with pegs, not nails. There were interactive displays here where you could move windmills around by the push of a button– I was a Wind Goddess.

I'm not a big automobile enthusiast but since I was in the neighborhood, I stopped in at the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Automobile Museum. Holy cow!!!! I always thought that the thirties, the Depression era, were a time of extreme poverty for everybody. Evidently not – these cars were epitome of luxury. I think I lusted after every single car here. The collection is located in the Auburn Motor Companies Art Deco administrative/showroom building which is on the National Register of Historic Places and was declared a National Historic Landmark in 2005.

I loved, loved, loved this car.  Notice the secondary windshield in front of the back seat

There is a little known museum called the Karpelis Manuscript Library Museum. Mr. Karpelis buys wonderful old buildings (there is one in Duluth Minnesota) around the US and sends portions of his manuscript collection around to these 17 different buildings on a rotating basis. Mr. Karpelis is rumored to have over a million different manuscripts. The current collection in Fort Wayne is a series of manuscripts written by Alexander Graham Bell where he first talked about his new invention, the telephone to talking about setting up phone lines across the country. There was even an old phone book page for New York that had a total of 50 people listed. The one I found fascinating was a manuscript from 1587 with “Instructions For The Beginning Campaign Against The Invincible Spanish Armada”. It is utterly amazing to me that this manuscript has survived all these years.

I did get to the Fort Wayne Museum of Art where they had a nice display of Brilliant Cut Glass, but the stand out exhibit was a photography exhibit of Clyde Butcher, who is a conservation photographer ala Ansel Adams. I might have like Butcher's photos a little better than Ansel's, but maybe that is because they were huge and detailed.  https://clydebutcher.com/

I leave you with this Gordon Parks photo:

Pearls Before Cows

 

I found a county campground right between Davenport and Muscatine Iowa where I could actually stay for several days. I felt very fortunate because it is so hard to get into these county, state, national campgrounds, especially on a weekend, which this was. There are four, count them four lakes with many trails around them. The only problem was that last summer they had drained all of the lakes to do lakeshore restoration. All I saw were big muddy holes. They were going to start filling the lakes on Monday, the day I was leaving. Timing is everything.

I had planned on going to the Figge Art Museum in Davenport for a little more upscale culture. Then I saw, just down the road in Muscatine, the National Pearl Button Museum. How could I pass that up?

Muscatine was the Pearl Button Capital of the World back in the day. In 1905, Muscatine produced 1.5 billion buttons annually. This boom lasted only 75 years before the plastic button took over. The fact that the fresh water mussels had been pretty much decimated also was a factor. In the late 1800's, there were 300 mussel species native to North America. More than half of these species are now threatened or endangered.

Several different species of river mussels
Those chains are dragged along the bottom of the river and the mussels grab on to them.
One of several ways to harvest mussels

A Pearl Button salesman's jacket

After visiting this museum, I now know how to pull mussels out of the river, make them open their shells, punch holes in the shells and finish/polish the buttons. Too bad this is not a skill that I will get a lot of use out of.

I'm not so sure I want to stay too long in Muscatine

I joined an organization called Harvest Hosts. They contract with individual businesses to let Rvers stay on their property. Think wineries, breweries and farms. In exchange, we are supposed to buy a small amount of merchandise from these hosts.

I stayed a night at Hansen's Dairy in Hudson, Iowa. They are a single source dairy in that they raise the cows and have a creamery right on site. Every afternoon, they take you on a tour showing you the inner workings of a dairy farm. This was no small potatoes operation either. They have 300 cows of which 150 are being milked (twice a day at 4:00 am and pm) and the other 150 are babies or pregnant. I got to milk a cow, feed a calf, make butter by hand and, wait for it......feed and pet kangaroos. Evidently one of the owners went to Australia, fell in love with Kangaroos and decided the farm needed them.

This sign was along the side of a one million gallon manure pit

The old man of the mob

I'm feeding Roo-dolph here - all the kangaroos had names starting with Roo
I think he is threeyears old

This is one year old Roo-dy

This is Aztec, the calf I got to feed.  She is less than a month old. 
 Don't let that sweet face fool you - she was a hellion when it came to her bottle

The milking station, they milk 16 cows at a time

Gazing off into the distance

On my last leg home, as I was merging onto I35, all of a sudden there was a ding, ding, ding and my truck told me  'Engine Power Reduced'. The truck wasn't kidding, I couldn't go above 30 mph. I pull over to the side of the road and look in my manual. They tell me the engine is overheating, which was not the case. I checked my phone for Chevrolet dealers and luckily there was one just two miles down the road. I limped along the shoulder at about 10 mph and got to the dealer. I'm very proud of myself because as we all know, car dealers fill their lots with tons and tons of cars. My 36' camper and I threaded our way through all those cars and got to the service area. They ran some codes and it turns out that my turbo had locked open. I was about two hours away from home. They told me that I could make it, if I got the message again, pull over to the shoulder, turn off the truck and let it reset itself. Then I could drive on. It was a stressful two hours but I made it back to the Motherland without incident. Just another very expensive thing that will need to be fixed.

Way Out West in Indianapolis

 

As I start my slow trek westward, back toward Minnesota, it turns out that Indianapolis is right smack dab in the way. Indianapolis has a state park located downtown on the canal. There is lots to do in the park – they have walking paths, museums, bikes and kayak rentals, IMAX – it is impressive that Indiana allocated all this land and planned this out. The Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art called to me. I wanted to see Hard Twist: Western Ranch Women Photographs but the exhibit closed three days before I got there. It was a small museum, but they had some big names there: Remington, O'Keefe, Thomas Hart Benton among others. Looking at the landscape art really made me want to go back out west again. As one friend told me – some people are just never satisfied where they are at.

I need to go here.

Not a photograph

The American Indian artifacts were cool – they were mostly western tribes catagorized by area: Alaskan, Californian, Pueblo. I suppose that makes sense given the name of the museum. Besides the traditional baskets, blankets and moccasins, there was also contemporary art also.

Bluegrass Capital

 

A friend of mine told me about an exhibition at the Speed Museum in Louisville, Kentucky that sounded interesting. “Promise Witness Remembrance reflects on the life of Breonna Taylor, her killing in 2020, and the year of protests that followed”.

Artist Nari Ward
These are shoelaces.  

One of the art pieces consisted of two flags, which were draped from the ceiling to the floor. Each star in the flags represent a life lost to gun violence. The artist thinks of these lives as “fallen stars”. 15,433 were killed by gun violence in 2019. 15,433 people, including Breonna Taylor were killed by gun violence in 2020. As you move through the galleries, a portrait by Amy Sherald (she did the official portrait of Michelle Obama) of Breonna dominates the last wall – it was quite moving.

This is the 2020 flag

There was another exhibit by Isabelle de Borchgrove – life-size clothes made out of paper. The amount of detail and craftsmanship was stunning.

Sometimes there were portraits behind the dresses
which were the ones that inspired the artist for a particular dress

I am vehemently opposed to the racing of two and three year old horses. These are baby horses – their bones haven't even finished growing yet. I have to say, though, that when I walked on the grounds of Churchill Downs I got a little weak in the knees. There is so much history and tradition here.

The grandstand

The Track

The horse when he has finished the race

I am a sucker for factory tours – automation, machines whipping out hundreds, thousands, millions of the same article in a matter of minutes. So, I jumped at the chance to tour the Louisville Slugger factory and museum. I have to say, I was surprised at how small and intimate the assembly line was. The Louisville Slugger bat has been manufactured since the late 1800's. The wood for the bats all come from a forest on the PA/NY border. Bats are made from maple, ash and birch – each type of wood has different characteristics. For example, birch gets harder the more it gets hit.

This is how the factory gets the wood from the lumber mills.  
They call them billets.

All colors that are to be used in professional baseball must be approved by the MLB

A maxi bat

Everybody got to take home a mini bat. 
I'm thinking another self protection item in my arsenal.

There is a new type of hotel that is beginning to pop up called Museum Hotels. There is one in Louisville, the 21C. They have exhibitions just like a regular art museum, but you can also sleep with the art. They tend to specialize in more contemporary art.

A limo outside of the 21C

This was carved out of books

More book art

Just a small portion of what they call Finn's Flock