Corn Fields and Oddities

Topeka to North Platte, NE (9/12):
Today was another long day of driving punctuated by short side stops. We woke up in Topeka, Kansas, home of the Brown v. Board lawsuit and a museum dedicated to it. Brown v. Board was one of 6 lawsuits that reached the Supreme Court at the same time and were combined into a single decision overturning the Plessy v. Ferguson separate but equal tenet. According to the friendly park ranger, unlike the other 5 cases that were rolled into the Brown decision, the original Brown case was not a question of access or quality. While the districts involved in the other cases had measurably worse quality of education for minority students, the Topeka system was apparently equal for all students, just separate. (Or so the Kansans would have us believe -B). In striking down school segregation, the Supreme Court opened the door for desegregation in other areas. The Civil Rights Movement, along with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, followed in the 1960s. Later legislation about access, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act, stemmed from the Brown case. The museum traced Brown and the other cases and the protests against integration that followed when schools were integrated. (And, props to Kansas for including Matthew Shepard in their timeline of the struggle for civil rights -B).

After Topeka, we sampled Maimie Eisenhower's famous (?) sugar cookies in Abilene, KS (awful -B), birthplace of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and site of his presidential library before taking highways to Cawker City, KS, which is the home of the world's largest ball of twine. From there it was a short hop to the geographic center of the contiguous 48 states (Which, it turns out, is guarded by a terrifying Rooster. The souvenirs are oddly enough kept in Lebanon -B). We made it into Nebraska, where strange, scary noises emanating from our car made us think it was about to break down or fly off the road. Mystery solved, however, when we passed a sign that informed us the previous stretch of road had been built with 41,000 recycled tires, which had caused our car to vibrate strangely.

We have one more day of long driving before we make it to South Dakota and camp for a few days. We've driven well over 1,000 miles in the past 4 days, but I'm pretty excited by all the places we've been able to drop by on the way.
-M