Kansas - Manhattan, Abilene, Fort Riley

Manhattan –

We had a great campsite in Manhattan at the Corp of Engineers Tuttle Creek Cove Campground; with our NP pass, just $9/night for 50 amp power and water.  It was a quiet campground on the lake, and would have been perfect if the sites had been level.  We never could get level even with our jacks and 2x6s.  (For our RV friends, sites 11, 12, and 36-39 are level.)  We stayed there for a full week, through July 4th.  Manhattan is a fairly good size town and home of Kansas State University.   It was a good home base from which to see the sights in Abilene, Wamego, Fort Riley, and Council Grove.

Just south of Manhattan is the Konza Prairie overlook which surrounds visitors with a view of Kansas much as it looked 150 years ago with an uninterrupted vista of prairie and sky.  The Konza unfurls across the rocky hillsides and green valleys of the Flint Hills, a nearly treeless 4.5 million acres that encompasses North America's largest remaining tallgrass prairie.  A few miles further south is the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve.  It was established in 1996 as the first national park dedicated to preserving grasslands.  We toured the 1881 ranch house and barn.  We would have liked to hike out into the prairie but it was 102 degrees.  It wasn’t hard to persuade ourselves to just drive along the road in our air-conditioned car.  Next time we will come in October and do a little hiking.


We did a short trip to the Pillsbury Crossing.  This is a natural flat-rock crossing that has been used by wild animals and Native Americans as well as pioneers and now local people and tourists to cross the river.  It was very pretty and an unexpected water oasis in the midst of the prairie, and obviously a favorite for local families.  I was wishing I had brought my swim suit with me.  On the way back, we stopped at the Barr Cabin.  This old cabin, built in 1863, was discovered intact inside a ranch house when the house was torn down in 1962. 

Abilene –

 

 What a week!  One day we visited the gravesite of a President; the next day it was the gravesite of a horse!  It’s amazing what you can find when you look for local sights and sounds.  In Abilene we visited the Eisenhower Presidential Museum and Library. The Eisenhowers live in this house from 1898 until Ike’s mother died in 1946.  The house is located on its original site and contains furniture and personal Eisenhower memorabilia.   Eisenhower’s home was quite small especially considering that there were seven boys growing up in it. Of the seven sons, only two did not go to college - one became a pharmacist, the other a lawyer. We guess that back then a degree was not necessary to dispense medicine or take someone to court. The museum presented Ike’s history from his humble beginnings on the wrong side of the tracks in Abilene, to West Point, thru three wars, and finally the White House.  A small chapel contains the graves of Ike and Mamie. 

Fort Riley –

Fort Riley, established in the 1850s to protect travelers and settlers in the west, is home to the Big Red One, the U.S. Army’s 1^st Infantry Division.  It is a beautiful base with many historic buildings constructed of native limestone.  We visited the Infantry Museum, the Cavalry Museum, and the Custer House, officer quarters built in the mid-1800s.  One of the most unusual exhibits was a gas mask for horses, used during WWI.  We walked around the parade grounds and saw the gravesite and monument to Chief, the last cavalry horse who was retired in 1949 and died in 1968.  The base was on the closure list several times but is now undergoing expansion and new building.