Long-time readers will react to me saying “I go to a lot of car shows” with an emphatic “DUH!”
Before the blog, when I lived in Phoenix, I attended several Barrett-Jackson auctions, which, if you’re not buying, are just big car shows where every car is for sale. I went to a couple of Copper State Rally shows, where all the cars embarked on thousand-mile tours. The first place I saw an Elise was at an English car show there. Since I got the Elise, I’ve entered the Colorado Concours and the English Motoring Conclave several times. I’ve been to a couple of dozen Cars and Coffee events. I’ve taken tours of restoration shops where I’ve seen multi-million dollar Bugattis and Ferraris. I’ve seen exotics, muscle cars, race cars, hot rods, antiques, low-riders, motorcycles, tractors, and fire trucks. I’ve never had to drive more than about thirty miles to go to any of these.
So, when a Lotus Colorado member told us about a big car show at McPherson College in McPherson, Kansas, my first thought was, “That’s a long way to go for a car show!” I think it’d be a fun trip to go to the Pebble Beach Concours in Monterey, California. It’s one of the world’s great car shows. Although it’s more than twice as far as McPherson, it’s through some fine scenery and over twisty roads through the Rockies and Sierras. To get to McPherson, it’s eastern Colorado and western Kansas.
And how does the show in McPherson compare to any others I’ve been to? They have a renowned auto restoration curriculum there, and the students entered a car they worked on into the Pebble Beach show and won the top prize. The show is run by the students, and several of the cars on display are student projects.
Club members didn’t express much interest, and I had pretty much decided not to go when Chad called and said he’d drive us in his Maverick rather than the Lotus. I thought, “What the heck,” and said I’d go. We both had the condition that we’d have to include some interesting side-trips to sweeten the pot. In nearby Hutchinson, there’s a salt mine you can tour, and there’s the Cosmosphere, a space museum. As a bonus, on the drive back, we can stop at the site of a World War II Japanese Interment camp. (A tip of the hat to Jim for his helpful suggestions.)
So that was the plan: salt mine, space museum, car show, and concentration camp.
Thursday was the drive to Hutchinson. There’s not much point in describing the route or the views. After checking in at the hotel, we went to the Salt City Brewing Company for beer and dinner.
Strataca
About a century and a half ago, a man drilled for oil but found salt instead. Today, you descend in a hoist 650 feet down to the mine, where you find over 150 miles of tunnels, a small sample of which you are allowed to explore.
We did the basic tour and added the Lantern Tour, where we were taken deeper into the darkness. The guide compared it to the surface of the moon: no wind, no weather, nothing to disturb the footprints miners made 80 or 90 years ago. It wasn’t worth the effort to haul the miners’ trash back to the surface, so we occasionally came across piles of perfectly preserved trash – cardboard dynamite boxes still like new (but empty of dynamite), newspapers and magazines and those conical water fountain cups looking as if they were discarded yesterday.
Generally, the caverns are fifty feet wide, separated by fifty-foot-wide pillars, making a sort of giant waffle iron. The walls are salt, the ceiling is salt, the floor is salt. It looks like rock, stratified by bands of dark and light. We are told the salt is 95% pure, with some formations reaching 99%. We were also told not to lick the walls. The salt mined here is used on icy roads and as cattle feed. There is red salt in places, but they don’t mine it as the cattle won’t eat red salt.
So, what is there to see in a salt mine, other than salt? First, there’s the obvious display of the mining equipment used over the decades, along with helpful videos explaining how the salt was (and still is) mined. After several such exhibits, we turned a corner to find … a Civil Defense shelter! As a child of the 60s, I’m well familiar with the lore. But before now, I’d never seen what someone hiding from nuclear holocaust might eat. I imagined stacks of canned green beans (and was not disappointed to see them), but didn’t realize that crackers, biscuits, and carbohydrate supplements were distributed in giant cans, along with 17-gallon drums of water, complete with instructions to turn the drum into a commode.
Also, because of the constant temperature and lack of humidity, a salt mine is a great place to store things you want to preserve, such as paper documents, computer tapes, and old films and movie memorabilia.
Cosmosphere
Now and then, I come across something that seems out of place. The world’s foremost pre-war Bugatti restoration shop used to be in Berthoud, Colorado, a town so small it has no traffic signals. How did that happen?
The Cosmosphere is a space museum that rivals the Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian. How did such an impressive museum come to be in Kansas? Florida or Houston would be obvious choices. Huntsville or Pasadena, maybe. But Hutchinson, Kansas? Go figure.
It concentrates on space, not aircraft, so it’s not as big, but the collection of space artifacts exceeds what I saw at the Smithsonian. Some of the exhibits here are on loan from the Smithsonian, and some are from private collections, but much of what’s on display at the Cosmosphere is from their own collection.
There are a few aircraft here, like the SR-71 Blackbird. How do you get your SR-71 inside a museum? That’s a trick question: you build the museum around the plane.
Their exhibits cover the entire history of manned spaceflight, from the origins in Nazi weapons (the V2 was the basis for the Redstone rocket) to a SpaceX Merlin engine. I was particularly impressed by the quantity of Soviet gear here. I want to make a joke that this is the entire collection of Soviet space capsules that didn’t blow up on launch or on landing
I was surprised to learn that the Cosmosphere restores these artifacts. It’s not like restoring an eighty-year-old car that can be driven on the road – the spacecraft here in Kansas are only restored to look functional. Nobody is going to fire up that rocket engine or launch this capsule. Still, how do you go about getting a job as a restorer of antique Soviet spacecraft?
These guys restored a V2 they found in a barn. It’s fairly common to hear of rare old cars found in barns, but a V2? Incredible. And it’s not just “barn finds”. They have the Liberty 7 capsule. It was the second manned craft in the Mercury program, a sub-orbital flight carrying Gus Grissom. The capsule sank to the bottom of the ocean after they got Grissom out. It was recovered from the ocean floor in 1999 and was restored by the museum. Amazing.
I assume the name “Cosmosphere” is a play on Cosmonaut. I recently learned the origin of the word “Cosmonaut”. I thought it was simply from “cosmos,” an alternative name for the universe. Instead, it comes from “cosmism” – a Russian philosophical movement integrating science, religion, and metaphysics into a unified worldview and characterized by the belief in humanity’s cosmic destiny, the potential for immortality, and the use of technological advancements to achieve control over nature and explore space. Believers in cosmism imagined immortality for everyone and the resurrection of all past people. (Now I can’t help but wonder if Philip José Farmer looked into it before writing To Your Scattered Bodies Go.)
After exploring space technology, we continued our exploration of local brew pubs. Tonight it was Sandhills Brewing. As a fan of fruit sours and goses, I liked their selection of beers. No kitchen here, but the food truck outside had a selection of tasty foods.
That’s it for Friday.
