A Trip to Kansas

In late May, my friend Jack and I took a trip to Kansas, to visit his family farm.

The family farm is in Leavenworth County, but we did not have time to drive over to the prison.

While we were there, one thing led to another and we took on a project to fix the ceiling in the farmhouse livingroom, damaged by a leaking roof a few years back.

 

There is a backstory here, which summarizes down to this: Jack and I bought a 1997 Ford F350 Super Duty (crew cab, extended bed) with around 200K miles on it, to use in various projects we have planned.  We drove it to Kansas, where Jack hoped some tools his father used would be usable/salvageable.  Alas, not to be.  The truck ran great the whole way, and got around 19 MPG going north, 14.5 MPG coming south.  We had a pretty good headwind coming south.  And some cargo, see below.

Jack's sister Monica lives on the family farm, and the ceiling damage was more than she could (or should) be fixing herself.  We ran down to the local home improvement store, and bought ladders, sheetrock, plumbers tape, and other incidentals, and tackled this repair while we were there.

Jack has two brothers and a sister living not terribly far away, who also came to visit while we were there.  

Sisters and nieces:

I really enjoyed lunch with the sisters and nieces, and was happy to see them all again.

After lunch and the home improvement store, Jack's two nearby brothers arrived and we got to work putting the insulation back in the ceiling and hanging sheetrock.

Here's the crew less me behind the camera:

 

and Me in the group, with Jack behind the camera:

 On the farm, Monica has horses, chickens, and at least one tarrapin:

 

While Jack and Monica kept warning me about "its an old farmhouse", I found the family and the house to be warm and inviting, thanks for putting up with us, Monica!

Going away from the farmhouse:

There's more to Kansas than farmhouses.  Here's some of what we saw while driving:

I saw a ton of this:  hood of truck on highway :-)

Some Kansas scenery.  Evidently they raise cattle in Kansas.

Monica had some bulk goods to share, mostly flour, wheat flour, white flour, winter wheat flour, cake flour, (you get the idea).  we brought back 550 lbs of dry goods . (to be fair, 100 lbs of that was chocolate chips.  No really).

CoffeeGoddess helped Jack and I split the goods, about half of which went into plastic containers from Walmart, the rest into ziplock bags for freezer storage.

So, a one-and-done project.  I look forward to my next Kansas trip.