Day 4 - Here Comes the Sun

We started out with a light rain and I thought we were in for another day of it. But after about an hour on the road it cleared up and it was all sunny skies from there on.

We got an early start as planned and headed northeast. We stopped in Sikeston, MO for lunch at Lambert's Cafe - The Only Home of Throwed Rolls. And yes, they really do throw the rolls to you. A fun place. The décor is something like Cracker Barrel with a lot of vintage items all over the place. You order an entrée from the menu, most come with your choice of two vegetable sides. On top of that servers are continually coming around with free, all-you-can-eat "pass-arounds" in large pots. Some of the ones we saw were fried okra, fried potatoes and onions, black-eyed peas, macaroni and tomatoes, and of course, the hot rolls. Mostly, they were tossed from a few feet away, but once in a while I'd see one fly across the room 15 feet or so and every one of them hit their intended target. I wondered how much training they had to have to do that, or maybe they only hired former baseball players for that job. LOL. The portions are huge, the prices are not. A fun place to stop and eat. Only now as I check out the website do I see that they have a large mural covering the entire side of the building. Totally missed it.

This next portion of our trip was the only time we weren't traveling on a major highway. Between Sikeston, MO and Paducah, KY we took smaller, scenic routes that went through lots and lots of farmland. We also crossed a couple of bridges. Rich snapped this picture while I was driving. Isn't it great? It was a beautiful drive, but we didn't stop to see anything because I wanted to make sure we got to Paducah with plenty of time to see the National Quilt Museum. We did and I wasn't disappointed.

We made it to the museum around 2:00pm. I looked at the quilts until 4:45! So many beautiful quilts to look at. Unfortunately, absolutely no photography was allowed. I did buy a book with pictures of quilts from the museum's collection, but the pictures don't show any of the quilting detail which makes so many of these quilts extraordinary. They had a little bit of everything in their main exhibit. My favorite were the hand-appliqué quilts, of course, but every single quilt was exceptional in some way. They also had a couple of special exhibits displayed. One was from Quilt Japan, the largest international quilt contest in Japan. A lot of art quilts with some unusual techniques I hadn't seen before. I tried to find a link online but didn't come up with anything.

The other exhibit was called On a Grand Scale. This was actually two different collections. One by artists Inge Mardal & Steen Hougs. Since no photography was allowed I don't have pictures, but if you go to their website you can see a slide show.  The other collection was by Eleanor McCain. She also has pictures on her website. As you can see, both collections are very artistic but in completely different ways. Mmmm, eye candy.