Vacation Day one July 16, 2011

Today we left the house about 5:30 and headed out. Our first stop at 10am was "Frontier Texas" in Abilene, TX. My brothers earned free tickets for our family through the Florence Library Reading Program. "Frontier Texas" itis a great museum for all ages. It had holographs though out the museum with 7 Texans(Buffalo hunter, Comanche warrior, explorer, slave, cowboy and 2 pioneer women) telling you their story in first person. The pioneers woman's story was extremely interesting to me. Her name was Elizabeth Carter Sprague Fitzpatrick Clifton. She married her first husband when she was 16 and moved to Texas. She was once captured in an Indian raid. By the time she died she had out lived each of her 4 husbands(she was married to one at a time and after one died she remarried) and all of her children and grandchildren.





One of them men they talked about was a Butterfield Overland Stage Coach driver. The Butterfield Overland Stage took people and mail on a very bumpy ride from St. Louis, MO to San Francisco, Ca.


Another interesting thing we saw was the Cannonball Courthouse exhibit. The courthouse in Buffalo Gap was built in 1879. To add to the security of the courthouse/jail, builders imported cannonballs from Vicksburg, Mississippi(which had accumulated an ample supply during the Civil War) and used them to prevent any movement in the stone regardless of the future condition of the mortar. Each stone is "locked" to the adjacent stone by 4 cannon balls imbedded half way in each block. It was very similar to the modern day LEGOS. The building is as solid as ever can still be seen in Buffalo Gap today.




Next we went to the other side of Abilene to the Courthouse where my grandparents, Tillman and Edith Howell were married in 1943.










Then we got a few pictures on a Buffalo ;)

After eating lunch we headed to our next destination The National WASP WWII Museum in Sweetwater, Tx. There was a group of Corvette at the Museum from Midland/Odessa visiting today. During World War 2, young woman pilots came to Texas from all over American to learn to fly ‘the Army way’ because there was a critical shortage of male pilots and their country needed them. They completed Army Air Force training, received their silver wings and AAF orders and served alongside AAF mail pilots at 120 air force bases. These Women became the WASP, Woman Airforce Service Pilots, the first women in history to fly America’s military air craft. My sister Elizabeth was been very interested in the WASP and what they did so we whet to the museum. It was VERY hot b/c it was in a metal airplane hangar with no A/C.

Below Molly (an American Girl doll) dressed as a WASP

Tonight was are staying in Littlefield, TX at the Waylon Jennings campground(his was born in Littlefield). For supper we had fresh from the grill: corn, beans and chicken, along a side salad, not from the grill :)