Patti DeLano - Missouri Off the Beaten Path®: Discover Your Fun

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Copyright 2018 by Patti DeLano

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ISSN 1539-8129
ISBN 978-1-4930-3116-0 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-4930-3117-7 (e-book)

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Patti DeLano is a travel writer and photographer from the Kansas City area who lived in the Ozarks of Missouri and vacationed across the borders in Arkansas and Kansas for more than 40 years. She has also written Arkansas Off the Beaten Path and Kansas Off the Beaten Path for Globe Pequot. She lives on the island of Venice, Florida, and cruises the East Coast as crew aboard the 34-foot Mainship M/V The Dark Side with Captain David McKie. They have a summer mooring in Belfast, Maine, where they live aboard the M/V Adagio with a rescued dog named JJ who spends his Florida winters working as a therapy dog in hospitals, schools, and nursing homes.

In memory of my dad, John Randazzo,
and his 90 years of life with me in Missouri,
and to my mom, Sally Randazzo, who
finally left Missouri to come live near me in Florida.
She is 100 years old, has e-mail and her own Facebook page,
and can still beat me at Scrabble.

No book comes easily, but a sense of humor helps. Its especially true of a book of this sort, which requires so many hours of research and fine-tuning. And so, the sense of humor and the camaraderie of my Missouri friends were essential to this 11th edition.

Thank you to William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri, where as a reentry student scholar with some, shall we say, maturity, I learned the art and craft of writing.

The Missouri Tourism Bureau and the Missouri Departments of Conservation and Natural Resources, not to mention all the visitors bureaus and chambers of commerce I contacted in hundreds of little towns, made it easier. I want to offer special thanks to the hundreds of people around the state who sent me new information and helped make the 11th edition even more fun.

Its impossible to include all the wonderful, quirky places I discovered in the course of researching this bookit would weigh five pounds. Others I simply did not know about; still others have recently appeared or, sadly, have gone out of business. If you know of a special place, or a change in an existing listing, please write me or the publisher so that I can add this information when I next update the book. We would love to hear from you concerning your experiences with this guide and how you feel it could be improved and be kept up to date. Please send your comments and suggestions to: Globe Pequot, Reader Response/Editorial Department, 246 Goose Lane, Suite 200, Guilford, CT 06437. Or e-mail: editorial@GlobePequot.com.

Think of Missouri and a hundred images tumble forward like candy from a piata. The Pony Express. The Santa Fe Trail. Lewis and Clark. The Civil War. Frank and Jesse James. Mark Twain (who once said that he was born here because Missouri was an unknown new state and needed attractions; we certainly got one in Samuel Clemens).

But all of the images are not from the distant past, flickering like a silent movie through the veil of time. Theres Branson, now threatening Nashville as the country music capital of the country, with countless entertainment palaces boasting big-name stars of everything from music to magic. Theres even a rodeo restaurant! (Ill tell you how to beat the crowds and traffic and help you find a quiet bed-and-breakfast instead of a computer-located motel.) Theres also Kansas Citys Country Club Plaza, the worlds first shopping center. Kansas City steaks. Charlie Parker and jazz. General John J. Pershing. The Gateway Arch. Barbecue. Writers Calvin Trillin and Richard Rhodes. The founder of Hallmark Cards, Joyce Hall, built an empire, with the international headquarters in Kansas City. Actors Brad Pitt, Kathleen Turner, Bob Cummings, John Goodman, and Don Johnson, as well as Walt Disney, all have ties to Missouri. And, of course, our own Harry S Truman. Now youre on a roll.

What you may not think of immediately are the things I will show you in Missouri: Off the Beaten Path. Did you know that J. C. Penney got his start here? Theres a museum to honor his modest beginnings in Hamilton. And Jacques Cousteauwhen you think of the man, you imagine oceanic dives in faraway places, right? Not always. Cousteau filmed a deep-earth dive right here in Bonne Terre and explored his way up the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers as well. Then theres the Kingdom of Callaway, with its postwar ties to none other than Winston Churchill. There are wineries and breweries and distilleries, and there are elegant restaurants and comfort-food cafes that range from fine French to fire-breathing Cajun, with home-style cooking settled somewhere in between.

harry s truman

Just for the record: Harry S Truman had no middle name. Just the S. Consequently, there is no period after the S in Harry S Truman, because it is not an abbreviation. Only sticklers and people from Missouri notice this, and the author is a stickler from Missouri. However, the controversy goes both ways at the Truman Library and even Harry himself used a period after the S in his signatureoccasionally.

What we are not is flat farmland, empty prairie, or wall-to-wall cows (or cowboys and Indians, for that matter). Theres a rich diversity of landscape here.

Missouri is covered with forests and rolling hills. It boasts more than 5,000 caves, and those are only the ones I know about. The rugged white bluffs along the rivers (the rocky remains of a prehistoric inland sea) and the volcanic formations and underground streams and caverns in the Lake of the Ozarks area are among the most beautiful in the country. The rivers that sculpted all this spectacular scenery are magnets for exploration; the Jacks Fork, Eleven Point, and Current Rivers are designated National Scenic Riverways. Remnant prairies still beckonpatchwork bits and pieces left over from presettlement days, when the big bluestem and gayfeather grasses were tall enough to hide a man on horseback, and the wind-driven waves imitated a sea of grass.

In 1673 Marquette and Joliet came down the Mississippi River and saw the land that is now called Missouri. The Jesuit missionaries (the Mission of St. Francis Xavier) established the first white settlement in Missouri near the present site of St. Louis around 1700. The Mississippi River, which forms the eastern boundary of the state, is still one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world and has been flowing here since before the dawn of time. The upstart Missouri River, on the other hand, was the gift of a departing glacier a short half million years ago; it simply wasnt there before that time. The division between the glaciated plains to the north (rolling and covered with a generous layer of topsoil, also a legacy of the wall of ice, which stole the soil from points north) and the bony Ozark region to the south (rough and hilly with valleys cut deep into rock) is the river that bisects the state from Kansas City to St. Louis. Missouri is where old prairie runs up against the oldest mountain range in the countrya fitting symbol for one of the most historically divided states in the Union.