US and us- Will we co-exist : Tulsa, Ramona, Skiatook, Bartlesville (Ok)and Coffeville (Kansas), then to Joplin Mo.

The highlight of the day for Nathalie was reading the blog and realising how much angst Andrew's exaggeration must gave caused everyone at home about the last two night's lodgings, however the real highlight for Nathalie was the Tulsa 'Whole Food Market'. Andrew believes a food shop is a food shop is a Food shop,however to Nathalie this this is the most amazing supermarket she has ever seen.

..they have (organic, it goes without saying) peanut butter makers,

Freshly cooked bacon, eggs and other foreign foods

bins of chia seeds, and so many other useful things.....it is a shop for some, a tourist attraction for others...we only needed some coffee...$57.00 later....for those who are expecting souvineers , 100 grams of chia seeds are looking good for you.

Then went for a walk around downtown Tulsa...very pretty and clean, but horribly quiet....

A bit of toilet humour

Either Nathalie is shrinking or that is a stupidly big pick up. Tulsa

Most of the big money in town seemed to have been spent of making the First Baptist Church take up a whole enormous block of the Tulsa area.

Actually the car park is theirs too.

There were notices placed around this grand building threatening loiterers (read for 'loiterers' homeless and indolent people) with having the police called to move them on.....curious...

Offend whom I may, but religion over here seems to be BIG business. I was always lead to believe that it is not about how big or grand the church is..... The most expensively huge and disproportionately ornate, well kept and opulent buildings in otherwise depressed, abandoned, and bankrupt areas are the church buildings..... Every town has at least one 'First Baptist' one 'Crossroads Church' and several other evangelical type churches. Leaves me with a question....if there are so many believers, and members of evangelical churches in these parts, to whom do they evangelise? There is no one left....

Still very wet and flooded all through this area.

Joplin

Just over the State Line from Kanss, is the Moussouri town of Joplin. Frankly not famous for much, but has a very sad recent history. In May 2011 a tornado struck a swathe of the town and killed 161 and injured thousands of people, destroying a substantial part of the town. It was still very noticeable four years after one area, all new houses and not one tree over four feet high. A modern five story hospital was so badly damaged that it had to be demolished. Storm shelters and cellars are foreign to we Australians, but bush fire shelters are emerging now.

There is a lovely park we visited and left a message in the book.

The memorial wall in 33 segments, representing 33 minutes of the tornado, the seventh (from the left) segment representing the time the tornado hit this park.

Did we go to Kansas City or Springfield (Mo)?

Well we decided to do neither....

The highlights of Springfield were just too overwhelming....

Coming in at number five: the Explore Passages Museum. We thought speology...or caving nup

I could see Andrew purchasing a seasons pass for this bible passages museum...have a read.

Or the next exciting place, with ONE review, the world's largest fork

Nor that

So we headed a but west and north through Kansas, to a place called Fort Scott, which was a marvellous National Park preserving an army outpost/fort of the 1830 s through the civil war to the 1870s...

So well kept, and the static displays were very detailed....got to chat with the head ranger, who, seeing we had signed the visitors register sought us out and wanted to talk about Australia....and he knew it wasn't near Germany. He clearly runs a good show at Ft Scott.