Friends, Animals and Kansas History, oh my!

What a weekend, and it isn't over yet. : ) We had such a great time in Abilene with our friends, they have a great property just outside of town. They have 2 girls, who are 6 and 8, so we had 4 adults, 3 girls, 2 horses, 7 cats, 5 dogs, 2 fish and chickens all hanging out together. We roasted marshmallows over a campfire and got to look at the stars and looked at the moon through a telescope. We all had a great time, the only bummer was that we squeezed our trip out there into a 24.5 hour window including 6 hours of driving, round-trip.

Before we left Abilene, we took the girls and the dogs to an amazing park there called Brown Memorial Park. This is an absolutely beautiful park that has a crazy story. If you didn't know any different, when you drive into this park you would think what a peaceful, natural, BEAUTIFUL park! What you wouldn't know is that back in the late 1920's it was C. L. Brown's (founder of the company which would eventually become Sprint) dream. He wanted to build a park as a way to give back to his community. He had a 10 year plan to build this park, and WOW, what a plan. He built a lake that was 1 mile long, he had a Whaling ship constructed there, he had a zoo (including elk and bear) he built . Anyway, the short story is that it was a MAJOR attraction in Kansas that had 17,000 visitors in 1 weekend. Now, it has all disappeared with just a few remaining clues that it ever even existed. You can't even find information about it online, at least not much, I did find this. We found a dried up waterfall, a bear cage, piers that the ship was tied to (we think), and random stone bridges. No lake, no crowds, no bears...

Just to add a bit more adventure to our road-trip we also climbed up to see the cannons that look out over Ft. Riley. I think I have pics of this that I will add.

After getting home, we noticed that Shorty can no longer wag his tail, I guess it is wagged-out. We are hoping that it isn't broken, but just tired... now that is a sign of a good weekend!