Monday, July 5, 2010

Indian Cave State Park, Nebraska

by Karen on July 5, 2010

in quilts

(This post is from Saturday evening  July 3rd) (I dug out the flower book – thought I had two books but only have one small guide and compared leaves on the pink flower from the last post and yes it is evening primrose several of you were right on that!)

What a rainy 4th of July weekend this has been!  It basically has rained the whole weekend other than about an hour right after we arrived at this park.  We made our hamburgers outside and then it started to rain a brief while afterward.  It cleared up in the evening and we took a short drive to the opposite end of the park where the Indian Cave is that the park is named for.

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Our evening exercise! Look at those steps, I was a little out of breath when we got to the top where the cave is.

I’m not sure what all the vine like plants are that are growing along side the steps, I did not recognize them as anything like what we have growing in Arkansas.

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One of the 15 petroglyphs that are on the cave walls. We did not spot all of the carvings but we did see about 4 or 5 of them I think.

There were of course a lot of modern petroglyphs (graffiti in other words!)  Why people have to do that is beyond me.

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This is the view from the top of the steps.  As you can see this cave is not a cave that you actually go into but more of an overhang.  At one time it might have been deeper as you might picture a cave being.  Look at all those vines – totally out of control.

I’m glad that we at least had a little time to look at things before it started to rain again.  We got done looking at the cave and went back down to the parking area – there has been a bit of flooding in the area due to snow run off and excess amount of rain in the area.  The Missouri river has flooded in areas.  The parking lot was most likely not accessible a week or two ago as you could see where the mud had been plowed (like a snow plow) there were a lot of animal tracks that you could see really well – and some people tracks – and yes they looked like that had slid in the mud and some of the prints were quite deep.

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People tracks

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Raccoon Tracks (?)

We leave here in the morning on our next step of the trip in Nebraska to visit some of Mike’s family.  I hope y’all had decent weather for your 4th of July – we went and saw a movie instead of sitting in the camper all day.  2 thumbs up for “Knight and Day” with Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz – it was an entertaining movie and was funny and worth the trip to the city to see it.

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2010 07 03 006ed

On Saturday we started our days drive from Joplin Missouri.  For our lunch time break we found this prairie rest stop in Kansas.  There was a short trail to walk and it had numerous signs along the way with historic happenings listed.  Also if you looked closely you could spot all the different kinds of wild flowers that grow.  There was plenty of them.

This rest stop is 29 miles from Fort Scott, Kansas – it is part of a designated national wild life refuge.  At the end of the little trail that we walked here is a pond that looked like it never goes dry and there was a lot of plant life and supposed to be a lot of birds and what not although we didn’t really see much.  That is our motor home in the parking lot there all by itself  – we almost had the place to ourselves.  One big semi truck in the parking lot and one or two cars up in the upper level where the cars park.

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This is some type of mimosa plant, the leaves are the same as on other varieties of that plant I have seen but the flowers look different, the blossoms were larger and had a kind of reddish center in them.

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I don’t know what these are – some kind of poppy maybe?  I know I have seen this when we travel to the west but I don’t have my book handy.  I will need to get the flower/plant book out and start looking through it once again to get familiar with names of the plants once again.

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This is the rest stop building, fairly new and nice design.  We have found that a lot of places over the last 5 or 10 years have spent more time building new buildings and updating rest stops to make them nicer for tourist.

We had no internet connection on Saturday or Sunday so I will be posting this blog post when I can.  You will find this trip that what I post at times will be several days after the fact.  I’m not sure when I will have internet service this trip so I will be scheduling some posts in advance to post on certain days.

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