Friday 10-13 Topeka Kansas

Topeka Kansas

Today we left Sac & Fox Casino and headed down the road for 54 miles to Topeka.

We arrived in Topeka around 9:00 and decided to go by Shawnee Lake Campground which is on the outskirts of Topeka. Shawnee Lake is a beautiful lake where people fish, do water sports and the University has their rowing team. The campground is setup like a parking lot. The sites look over the lake. It has a bike and hike trail that goes around the lake which is 7 miles long. There is a golf course, a couple of boat ramps with docks, beach area and day area.   

Larry's, Aunt Barbara lives in Topeka, Larry called her a couple of days ago and told her we would stop by between 1:00 and 2:00. Topeka is the capital of Kansas so before meeting up with Barbara we toured the Capitol Building. The Visitor Center for the Capitol Building is in the basement but their signs directing you there were not very good. We walked around the whole building before figuring out where to go. Once we got there we asked about touring the building. The lady said we were right on time, there was a tour at 11:00 and there was a tour of the dome at 12:15. We decided to do both. The first tour was an hour tour where the tour guide talked about the structure of the building, the paintings on each floor and took us through both the House of Representative and Senate Chambers. The paintings in the building were painted by three different painters and told the history of Kansas. There were sculptures in the building. We were taken in the governor's office where she talked about the furniture in the room. This governor uses this room for official greetings and press conferences. We used the old operator run elevator to get to the second floor, it's was installed in 1911. We walked through the State Library and took a spiral staircase to the second floor of the library and walked on a glass floor. We also went to the old Supreme Court. Our tour guide did a great job. 

Topeka Capitol Building

The Speaker's desk

The State Library

The Senate Chambers

The old Supreme Court room

The dome tour started on the fifth floor, we took an elevator up. During the tour we climbed 296 stairs. Our tour guide Joe, did a super job talking about the dome. We stopped on three different levels before we walked a spiral staircase all the way up to the top of the dome where we walked outside and around the dome, we had a great view of the city. It was a challenge to do this tour considering the spiral staircase was very narrow and only had hand railing on one side. We got a workout but it was fun.

The staircase we climbed

The spiral staircase to the top of the dome

After the two tours we went back to the Minnie and had a sandwich before going to see Barbara. We had and very enjoyable visit. She looked great.

Larry and Aunt Barbara

By the time we got back to Shawnee Lake it was time for dinner and it was 94 degrees. We have not seen temperatures in the 90s for two months, heck we have seldom seen them in the 80's. After turning on the A/C and cooling off I made spaghetti for dinner. Shawnee Lake Park has a bicycle program, where you can rent a bike for $2.50 an hour. Larry went online and signed me up and paid $5.00 to the account. After dinner we decided to test out the program. The bikes are locked up and to get them unlocked you have to enter your account number and a pin on a pad on the back of the bike. It took us a little bit to get it to work. It has been years since we have been on a bicycle so we didn't go far. At the beginning we were a little shaky and we had to figure out how to shift the gears. The bikes had three gears. The bike trail had hills so you had to go up and down the hills. We ended up riding 1.2 miles. By the time we finished we were tired and we could feel our legs working. It was a lot of fun riding the bike, maybe tomorrow we'll ride some more.

Having fun riding a bike

After putting the bike away I walked the trail for a half hour to get my steps. We had a very fun day.