On the way out, we had supper with another of our daughters and her boys. Our granddaughter was working so we missed visiting with her. We had hoped to have supper with yet another daughter and her family on the return trip, but could not work out the timing. They are both in the Knoxville area.

 

The leaves were changing when we were on the way out and were beautiful. It was fun to see little towns, twisty and hilly two lane roads and beautiful (and not so beautiful) farms and houses on our trip.  

 

Bill, our son, and his family have a nice sized farm in the Ozark foothills. They are in the process of buying another parcel of land not far from them. We went exploring the new land with them and joined them having a picnic. He is a software design supervisor at the corporate offices of O’Reilly Auto Parts and ranches and farms on the side to provide healthy food for his family.

We went to Springfield and visited a couple of museums. One was a railroad museum. They have a large steam locomotive, baggage car, double decker passenger car and a caboose that you can walk through. The baggage car is filled with historical items sort of like a tiny museum. This was interesting because my grandfather worked in the baggage car of a train that went between Jacksonville, Florida and Savannah, Georgia.

The office of the museum is a building built to the plans of a railroad station that was in Ellsinore, Missouri. That caught my eye because when I was growing up, Ellsinore was the “big” town (population about 400) some seven miles from us as the crow flies. I spent my first four years of school in a one room school in the country, but when I was in the fifth grade, I got bussed to the “big” school in Ellsinore. The school was so large there were only two grades, not eight, in each class room. They even had indoor bathrooms and hot and cold running water at the Ellsinore school!!

When we lived near Ellsinore, the train station was already gone. That was back in the early and middle 1950s. For that matter, I did not even realize the train went through the town until I was looking at the railroad website a few weeks ago.

 

When we lived there, we drove another 20 miles to Williamsville to pick up shipments we got by rail. Back in the day, you could have items shipped by rail using REA (Railway Express Agency). They would drop the items at the nearest rail depot and you had to go there to pick them up. We had printing presses, baby chicks, garden tractors and other items shipped REA. This was before UPS delivered in the backwoods and FedEx was years in the future. If the Post Office could not carry the item, it had to go by rail.

After we visited the Railroad museum, we stopped at the Air and Military Museum of the Ozarks. (Note the abbreviation: AMMO). This was a small museum, but they did have some fun items. It was started by the Commemorative Air Force (the Confederate Air Force before political correctness got to them) and then spun off as a separate museum.

 

The grands sat in a Vietnam era Apache Helicopter trainer and a M-151 Jeep. They got to inspect a number of other vehicles as well.

 

The museum had many military uniforms and plastic aircraft models on display as well as actual vehicles and aircraft. It was small, but nice. The museum director was patient and informative and the grandchildren loved it. So did their grandfather. 

 

They also had some rusty parts of what looked like a machine gun and other aircraft parts in a display case. It turned out, a pilot — I don’t recall his name — was making a run, perhaps his last run, over Germany during World War II. On the way home, he disappeared. Sixty or seventy years later, parts of his plane were found in a lake or pond in Germany. His remains were sent home and most of the salvaged parts were given to this museum. It was an interesting, but sad story. The pilot almost made it home. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In this home, we replaced the not so good looking floor with brick tile at one of the entrance doors. It was a nice upgrade.

The brick tile looks just like actual paver bricks, but is only about 1/2″ thick, so the floor often does not need to be recessed as it would for actual brick pavers.