Welcome To Old Abilene Town ( Fort Riley, KS)

Uh, hello there! Remember me? I used to write on this blog and give updates about our life and fun stuff. 

Well, I'm finally back from my in-definite and accidental hiatus. 

We have been seriously busy and crazy excited about something big that we will be announcing to the general public on Friday. 

Alright, let's get down to business...
So, like most good ideas this one came in the shower. I decided that our blog should do something besides exist. It should help people. And who better to help than people we can connect with through similar circumstances. Military families.

Alex decided that he liked this idea so we've set out to help military families get to know an area/ base before they move there.

When we were informed that we'd be moving to the Fort Riley area of Kansas we were hopeful, but just a little dumbfounded. What is in Kansas, I had never thought about it before. So, like most military people do, I turned toward google to find out about the new place I'd call home and here inlies the problem. I read a number of online forums and online group boards about Fort Riley and other bases and the common theme throughout them all was the irrelevant answers and opinions the everyone gave.  A general response on the boards sounded something like....

" I hate fort ____ because it's so hot. It's just stupid and the target is 10 miles away! And the only thing to do there is go shopping or hike nature trails or go to the beach, so there isn't anything you can do with kids."

I'm not even joking, that was someone's answer about a certain base.

Let's just be real honest, when the Military tells you that you get to move somewhere, hearing everyone's negative opinions about that place isn't exactly helpful.

So because of this, we are going to be a family that documents all the fun to be had at every base we have the privilege of being stationed at.   

So please, Enjoy Old Abilene Town....

Old Abilene Town is a recreation of the historic Abilene.

The story is, Abilene was a really rough cow town until the town hired Wild Bill Hickok as their sheriff. And Hickok cleaned up the town and drove off the riff-raff. 

Every Saturday and  Sunday in the summer  from 10am-3:30pm there are funny reenactments of Wild Bill and the "Riff-Raff" by The Gunfighters.

  

You can ride the passenger train (Train information).

On certain weekends a Steam train takes guest out and they are served dinner aboard (Dinner Train Information).

 This historic carriage house was moved from another location in Abilene to be part of Old Abilene Town. 

Old Abilene Town is just one of the many unique places in this area but it's a go-to spot when we have visitors. 

I Got My Mind On My Bunny, My Bunny On My Mind.....

G-Man is obviously pretty chill with the Bun-Bun up there. We had a FABULOUS time at the Eisenhower center for the Easter Egg Roll. Enjoy the pictures!

We Go To Wichita.

We have had a busy Easter weekend and it is only Saturday. We kicked off the weekend by spending the afternoon and evening in Wichita for Winter Jam, a concert featuring 10 bands. We brought the boy along and he had a blast listening to the music and dancing.

This boy was SOOOO excited.

Our seats were actually better than the pictures let on, above 35mm cameras were not allowed in to the concert however they let me be an exception as long as I used the zoom under 35mm.

We had a really fun night, Baby Boy crashed out before Toby Mac performed, so in my opinion he missed the best performance but we'll be sure to tell him about it when he is older ;) 

Wilson Lake.

Hubby had Monday off of work so we decided to drive out to Wilson Lake. 

We heard it is one of the prettiest places around and in Kansas pretty things are few and far between so we made the hour journey to see the lake.

We found a blog talking about some bike trails and it had some pretty stellar pictures of an inlet. 

We followed the bike trail (on foot) to what we thought was going to be the inlet only to end up walking two miles and get STUCK in some nasty sinking mud. Let me rephrase that, I got stuck in nasty sinking mud.

The bike trail was really neat, it kind of reminded me of a desert or Mt. Haleakala (we biked it on our honeymoon). The sinking mud... Not so much. I got stuck while having a mini-FREAK OUT. Everything was sucking my feet down and there were spiders everywhere, it smelled like poop and all the fallen reeds looked like snakes, I couldn't handle it. Thankfully Hubby came and helped me out.

On our way out of the state park we realized that we drove right past the inlet and thinking back I remember thinking "hmmm that's a neat little inlet..."

We stopped and hung out for a while. Hubby even caught a fish on the FIRST cast. 

Now that we know where the good spots are we will totally go back for a visit. We are even planning to go back and ride the bike trails when we get bikes. We'll avoid the mud next time ;)