No Friday Smiles, but a lot of fun, anyway

Friday Smiles, brought to you by Annie at A Stitch In Time is on hiatus.  She has finally moved, no small fete it seems, for which everyone is happy and definitely smiling. Unfortunately, she has no internet service, thus the hiatus.  But that's not stopping me from having my own Friday Smile.

Some of you may recall, my friend Kathy and I were out and about a few weeks ago, and we finally reached our destination, the Reno County Museum.  Reno is one of 105 counties in Kansas, and there are several small towns in the county.  Of the 50 states, 48 have counties that divide a state into regions for various reasons, such as geography or politics. Alaska and Louisiana are the two exceptions, with Alaska having boroughs and Louisiana having parishes.  Functionally, they are the same or equivalent.

Since I suggested that my International friends might not be as interested in this museum, I chose not to show these photos during Friday Smiles.  But since I was of the impression there would be no Friday Smiles this week, I chose to show the museum.

I'll try to keep comments to a minimum and let you peruse the museum the way Kathy and I did.  Yoder is one of the small towns in the county, and the town I always stop in for those awesome cinnamon rolls I share with Kathy. 

Yoder has a large Amish community.

You can see each town is represented with artifacts and products from their town.

It took me awhile to realize RCM stood for Reno County Museum.  Have I mentioned I don't do acronyms well (grin)?

I have one of those same plastic egg separators, but mine is red.

Don't you just LOVE those grain elevators?  When I first saw them, I thought they were salt and pepper shakers.

Next came the car and other vehicles room.  I didn't realize I had captured Kathy in the photo until I enlarged it.

I took lots of photos in the vehicle room, but when I looked for them on my camera, they were nowhere to be seen.  I also noticed I'm missing photos from the room we had just visited, but have no idea where they went, since I hadn't removed any photos from my camera/SD card when I accidentally deleted the zoo photos.

 

Both walls above show old photos of Memorial Hall and a part of one of the columns from the original building.  I KNEW I remembered white columns from before, but you might recall

from a photo I showed before, the new ones had been painted green.  There were even photos of the flooding in that building and how high the flooding was.

I fell in love with the room full of old tools.  People who know me, know my love of tools.  Kathy and I had fun looking for each of the tools listed on the charts.

There was a step stool for children and short people like me to climb up and see these tools.  That pocket knife looked like one my Grandfather owned, right down to the scrimshaw handle.

A photo of the wall that is still in Memorial Hall, the building with the green columns, had kisses of every shape and size.  We were told we could also leave our kiss on the Reno County Museum wall,

so even though Bleubeard wasn't with me, we both left a kiss!  So did Kathy.  I even bought a few of them to take home with me.  Quite a bargain, too: 10 for twenty five cents. ($0.25 US).

These are some of the people who were shown on the outside of the building, and those who had adopted and/or restored the window.

Wouldn't you LOVE some of those images to use in your mixed media art?

As we wound our way to the second floor, the photos were incredible.  Who doesn't love old photos?

Then we entered the room Kathy was most interested in. 

Just like I was drawn to the tools, Kathy was drawn

to the jewels.

Since Kathy loves to make her own jewelry, this was the room that most interested her.

While Kathy continued to ooh and ahh over the jewelry,
I headed to the kids area, where I found this beauty.  You KNOW I had to get at least two shots of this rocking horse.  And those of you who don't know, I have a rocking horse collection that now exceeds 450 rockers.

I leave you with an overall view of part of the kids playroom.  You will see more of the telephone display soon.

I hope I didn't bore you.  I could and should have broken this into two posts, but I guess I was ready to end the trip I took to my friend Kathy's when we explored a few of the sights and sites in her home town.  Thanks as always for visiting, because I'm always grateful you stopped by.