Daily Didactic The morning began at the very nice Stockton Lake Campground. Theresa, spying a running opportunity, bounced off down the road as Brian showered and cleaned house. We stopped for a late breakfast at the campground restaurant (we said it was a very nice campground...) and met a lady who said she'd seen us eating dinner the night before in Lamar. This probably highlights the point that we clearly don't come from around here. Brian wanted to ask her if it was our vehicle, our clothes, our plates, or his choice of hair length. Of course, the answer would have simply been "Yes". Brian left well enough alone and we chatted for a bit with yet another very nice Missourian.We augered toward Kansas City to find the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and, a few hours later and more familiar with the less desirable parts of Kansas City than we really should be, we found it. So, Theresa has a thought on museum installations. If you are a large, prestigous museum that broadly claims to have the most complete collection of a given artist (let's say for point of argument, Thomas Hart Benton) and a renovation is going to cause you to have to put some amount of your normal collection in storage, why not leave out the given artist that attracts folks to you and put away some of that other art that can be found better represented elsewhere. Just a thought. So after the poor gal behind the counter talked Theresa down, we ambled through the museum and generally enjoyed the collection. It goes without saying that Brian was very enthused with the Claes Oldenburg Shuttlecocks. Theresa was pleased with the collection of Renaisance paintings, but is still slightly bitter about not getting to see Benton's stylized turn of the century American landscapes in person. Guess we'll be back...Extracting ourselves from large cities is an ongoing challenge of ours. We sit and we plan how to avoid traffic and confusion, and then invariably end up driving directly into the heart of the city. So, not to disappoint anyone, we did exactly the same today. Turns out downtown Kansas City is not so scary and reminded us of Portland or San Francisco. We eventually worked our way through rush hour traffic and back on to some good Kansas country roads, and headed south to Fort Scott (which we passed through two days ago on our way to Joplin) and then down Kansas Highway 7 to Crawford State Park.