My wife and I are currently sending wheelbarrows of cash from our savings account to the University of Kansas as a son and daughter begin their freshman and senior years, respectively. So, when I received a text from The Mrs. asking if I was up for doing something fun to start the weekend, it was followed up by a second text, “cheap and fun.” It was the first day in weeks that the temperature climbed no higher than 85 degrees, so I suggested a long walk along the path that runs through a forest near our home.
At the foot of the path is the Deanna Rose Farmstead, a charming children’s zoo and celebration of life on the Kansas prairie run by the city of Overland Park, Kansas. It was my wife’s idea to walk through the farmstead which, in the nine years we have lived here, I’ve never visited. We paid the $2 entrance fee and joined the groups of young parents showing their children the history of life on the prairie. The front portion of the farmstead holds a collection of animals indigenous to Kansas: prairie dogs, jayhawks, buffalo, bobcats, barn owls and an American bald eagle. The buffalo and the eagle were huge hits with the kids, and to us. The back forty is a working farm, including a one-room school house, a windmill operated water pump where youngsters can mine for planted “gold,” and Kaw tribe dwellings. The biggest draw was the cow milking shed, and a large pen where children could enter and feed bottles to tiny, bleating lambs.
It reminded me of Blackberry Farms, a similar draw in the Chicago suburbs where we took our now-collegiates when they were in their formative years. Fifteen years ago. Just yesterday, wasn’t it? I tried not to feel too old, because it really was an impressive and fun place, and I was sorry I had waited so long to enjoy it. And it was a marvelous way to get in a walk at the end the day. Well, that and a martini afterward.
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