American Gam

“Never interrupt someone doing what you said couldn’t be done.”
~ Amelia Earhart

Friday I visited Amelia Earhart’s Birthplace and Museum. Last year, when Treva was on her “Great American Road Trip”, I nicknamed her Amelia because of her adventurous spirit of driving through thirty states in thirty days. Her adventure is at: http://30states30days.wordpress.com. In her travels Treva made a point to stop and visit Amelia’s place so it only seemed right that I should also pass through Atchison, Kansas to pay a visit to Amelia’s place on my Great American Road Trip because, as Amelia puts it: “Adventure is worthwhile in itself.”

Admission to the museum is five dollars for the self-guided tour. There’s a lot of genuine articles that belonged to Amelia and her family. There’s a woman named Jan and her mother who are the caretakers of the home and museum. Jan told me about Amelia’s defiance of the rules in a male dominated society. She said boys could climb over the fence to go down and explore the caves that were inside the cliffs in front of her house but girls weren’t allowed so Amelia dug a secret hole under the fence to go explore the caves on her own and when boys were allowed to go on the rollercoaster at the fair and Amelia was not, she and her girlfriend went home and built their own wooden rollercoaster in the backyard that was attached to the top of the shed. She injured herself, but did it anyway and said it was like flying.

I hope you have some Amelia in you, her tenacity, her defiance of authority, her spirit of adventure.

The gam continues…