Day 2 - Zoo!

"When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without a thought on anything but the ride you are taking."

-Authur Conan Doyle, in an 1896 article for Scientific American

"If the wind is not against you, it is not blowing."

-James E. Starrs, The Noisless Tenor

Kansas City, Missouri is windy! I asked the waitress if it was like this all the time and she said, "It is during the windy season."

"When is the windy season?" I asked.

"Begins in March and ends in May."

We are in Kansas City at the Hampton Inn (Margaret's campground). To get here we had to go through St. Louis, Missouri which accounts for the title of this blog, "Zoo."

Now St. Louis really isn't a zoo but today part of it was. I'll tell you about that part later. We came into the downtown part of the city to go to the City Museum, a museum of recycled items designed just for kids (and adults who are kids at heart). We came here for one reason only, to take photographs for our children's pastor, Ray Finger. He just happens to be one of those adults who is a kid at heart. There are not many people for which I would drive into the middle of a doggone city but Ray is one of those people.

The idea behind this mission into the very heart of this big city was to get ideas for the children's ministry of our church. After being there for about five seconds I realized this may be way too far out of the imagineering and engineering ideas and dreams of our thinking. It's hard to describe but the photos with this blog may get your visionary blood cells racing through your head. Everything in the City Museum is recycled. That's right, recycled! Someone once said, "One man's junk is another man's treasure." I don't for one minute believe that. I choose to believe my own quote, "One man's junk is another man's junk." You still have to find a place for it in your garage, attic, or basement. But if you're lucky, you'll find a place to store it in someone else's basement. It just so happened that this guy with the City Museum dream found a gigantic warehouse and some other dreamers and welded, glued, nailed, bolted together, and painted airplanes, steam engines, steel tables, reinforcing bars, cars, bottles, rollers, tiles, turtles, baking pans, conveyor belts, conveyor rollers, ropes, buses, signs, granite, glass, tubes, and whatever else he could find to make a hands-on, climb through, climb over, jump into, run around, yell and scream museum that kids love. 

My mission has been accomplished. I have the photographs and the church could even use some of these ideas. They won't fit into the box, the colors will go outside the lines, and some folks would stand and say, "What in the world?" But, kids would come from all over to just look through the windows! This is a fun place. If you ever get near St. Louis, the arch is super but there is a museum downtown that will knock your socks off. I highly recommend it.

As we drove away I was encouraged to know that dreamers are still dreaming and the world's a better (and more exciting place) because they are.

Next stop, the Zoo! We did not go to the zoo but headed out of town on I-64 headed for I-70 when we started seeing signs, "Expressway Ends." You don't see signs like that much but there it was, "Expressway Ends." And it did, boom, the end. We exited into an area we knew nothing about with no signs, directions, labels, or instructions. I thought maybe it was an extension of City Museum and that we were to find our way out of town. One out of two isn't bad, we did have to find our way out of town. I finally followed a policeman into a parking lot, got directions and headed out of St. Louis. At the entrance ramp to I-70 there was an eighteen-wheeler broken down blocking the ramp. After a right turn into the hood, a u-turn, a red light,a little prayer and complaining, and another u-turn, we were on I-70 headed for Kansas City. If you ever get to St. Louis, I don't recommend that!

All of this just to get some photographs for a pastor who happens to work with a bunch of kids. Yep, it was worth it and so are the kids. Kids are important. The Bible says, "Children are a gift from the Lord; they are a reward from him. Children born to a young man are like arrows in a warrior's hands. How happy is the man whose quiver is full of them" (Psalm 127:3-4). When the disciples of Jesus told the children not to bother him, Jesus told those disciples, "Let the children come to me. Don't stop them! For the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these" (Matthew 19:14). You better believe it, kids are important to God, important enough to do whatever it takes to get them and their families to church, even if it requires some recycled airplanes and conveyor belts!

We've come at total of 869.6 miles. 376.9 of those miles today. It's a good trip, just wish you could join us.