May 16

9:44-- Left motel
We drove to the visitor center in Lamar to see if there were any places we should see that we hadn't planned on. We also took a photo in front of the Madonna of the Trail statue. There are twelve of them built along National Trails Highways stretching from Maryland to California between 1928 and 1929, and four of them were on our planned route.

11:45 (Central Time)-- Stopped in Coolidge, KS (37 miles)
We were so close to Kansas we figured we might as well cross the border and add another state to the kids' list and visit another time zone. After taking photos around the "Welcome to Kansas" sign and Santa Fe Trail markers I decided to mail a postcard, only to find out that the post office closed 10 minute early for a one-hour lunch break. There wasn't an hour's worth of activities in that small town, so we headed back to Colorado. In Granada (pronounced "gra-NAY-dah") we arrived at the post office at 11:35 AM Mountain Time and discovered that that particular post office closed for lunch from 11:30 AM to 1:00 PM . Foiled again!

We called the director of the Amache Preservation Society at Granada High School so he could open the Amache Museum for us. Amache was a Japanese American relocation center (prison camp) used from August 1942 until the end of the war. My dad spent the first months of the evacuation at the Santa Anita race track (a temporary holding camp) until being sent to Amache when it opened. A sad fact we learned at the museum is that when the camp closed, those with no place to go back to got sent to the slums of Chicago, Boston, and New York to fend for themselves. Fortunately for my dad, his family eventually made its way back to Los Angeles after spending some time in Denver. After the museum visit we went to the Amache site, and my dad pointed out his barracks location to us and told us stories of his time there.

5:09 (Mountain Time) Dinner at Shorty's (60 miles)
The locals recommended Shorty's as "the best Mexican restaurant in the area" (between Las Animas and Granada). Umm... sometimes the best isn't very good. The crispy chile relleno (or, on their menu, "chili reyeno") had a crust like panko and may have been stuffed with American cheese. I will take Mexican food from So' Cal' any day.

7:06-- Arrived back at our motel (18 miles)