Steamboat Arabia Museum

Happy Sunday all!

I hope you’re having a good weekend.  I am, though, as usual, it’s flying by WAY too fast.  Along with our usual errand-running yesterday, my mom and I did a bit of sightseeing right here at home in Kansas City.

We’ve been talking about going to the Steamboat Arabia Museum for months and months, and finally decided to just go.  I had been a couple of times on school field trips when I was a kid, but my mom had never been.

In 1856, the Steamboat Arabia hit a snag and sank in the middle of the great Missouri River.  All human passengers survived, but everything in the 200-ton cargo hold was lost, and it was carrying supplies and goods for the frontier settlers.

In 1988, 132 years later, it was salvaged by a group of discoverers underneath a farm field in Kansas.  The Missouri River had changed course over the years.

Here are some pics from the museum:

This is Bob Hawley, one of the discoverers who spoke with us after we watched a short film:

We were able to smell a reproduction of the perfume shown below.  They warned us that it was on the strong side since people didn’t bathe as often back then.  They weren’t kidding.

Mr. Hawley informed us that they found over 3,000,000 beads on board.  It took them over 8 years to clean them all (pic is of a very small portion of them):

Mr. Hawley said that one of them tried one of the pickles from a jar similar to the ones shown above and they were still good!  They are also still working on restoring artifacts to this day:

Unfortunately, while all human passengers made it off the boat safely, there was one casualty.  A solitary mule.  Poor mule.  Here is his story:

And here’s the poor mule himself.  Still tied up:

Here are just a couple more:

After once again only having about four hours of sleep, I crashed fairly early last night (for me) and actually got eight hours of sleep!  It’s been a while.  Now, I’m up early.  I just had fresh strawberries and a deli chicken wrap for breakfast (oh yeah, and I’ve been on plan all weekend!), and just finished the Amazing Race finale.  Did any of you see it?  I thought the video game motion challenge thing they had to do was fairly awesome.

I think today is going to be a lazy day.  I’m not even planning on leaving the house, which will actually be nice after last weekend’s trip and working all week.  I think I’ll watch this week’s episode of The Biggest Loser next.

Well, I hope you all are having a fantastic weekend.  Enjoy your Sunday!