Finding a charming small town with kind townfolk and a decent library we decided to stay for a day. Then we discovered a snow storm was predicted to strike our return route in Oklahoma and therefore decided to stay for two.
Our first day in Kansas featured a cloudless sky with ample sunshine. Day two found cloudier skies, which we didn't pause to dwell on. With Isaiah gracefully bowing out, I ventured off alone for the town's one tourist attraction, the Wizard of Oz Museum.
Since the book/movie didn't name the town Dorothy lived in, Liberal claimed rights. (I just hope there really is no place like "home"). An ambitious woman (and perhaps the model on which Ben Foster based his Rampart role) spent six months putting together the "Land of Oz" and turning an old farmhouse into Dorothy's home. As a sign proclaims at the end of the tour the exhibit was not put together with any corporate sponsorship (though 4 loco was interested) I think the clarification was self evident. After first touring the free history museum which detailed the town's origins, including that of nearby "Beer town" which was the Vegas of Kansas (the Vegas of Nevada, not the Vegas of NM) in it's hay day, I waited for the $7 Wizard of Oz tour. A sweet girl in street clothes (they apparently only dress like Dorothy on the weekends) escorted me through Dorothy's house.
Taking little effort to make a real connection to the movie, the tour consisted of a walk through a small farmhouse with artifacts of the early 1900's. I was shown "Dorothy's room," where "Dorothy would play by the heater," the kitchen where "Auntie Em would churn butter" and finally Uncle Henry's "coffee mug with built in mustache guard" to protect the coffee from mustache wax, (A must have for the coffee swilling, mustache twirling hipster in your family).
The second portion of the tour was more or less self-guided, through a warehouse full of Dorothy manequins, a cowardly lion whose fear seemed, suitably, to be the 70's shag carpet purporting to be his fur and metal towers painted emerald green. All in all I cannot say the tour was worth $7, but it was an interesting experience.
We hunkered down in the Walmart parking lot to find firsthand that Oklahoma's storm was ambitious and had drifted more north than initially expected. Wind shook the van all night, a wind that pushed a shopping cart corral across the parking lot, smashing into a car. Morning could not come soon enough, all the while thinking, crap, the crazy museum lady was right, and we skeptics stuck in Liberal, would be swept up in a Dorthy tornado.
The tornado outside Dorothy's house
Glenda the Good Witch
An angry tree
Emerald City
The Tin Man
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