After visiting Jenn in Columbia, I went to Fulton, Missouri to stay with my friend Michelle. Here she is with her son John Michael (I must admit it was me who encouraged him to put on his clothing wrong!):

While in Fulton, she made me gooey butter cake:

and took me to the Winston Churchill Memorial and Library:

Who knew that he coined the phrase “Iron Curtain” in this small town in mid-Missouri? It was a great museum and also featured a beautiful Christopher Wren-designed church moved from London.

Skip forward a few days and I was off to SW Missouri. First stop Mansfield.

Mansfield is in a gorgeous part of the Ozarks. My real mission was to see the farm where Laura Ingalls Wilder lived out the rest of her life after her hardships in the upper midwest. She and Almanzo build a lovely farmhouse:

Later, their daughter Rose had a lovely modern stone house built for them.

But they soon grew homesick for the wooden house they had built themselves, and so moved back to it.

Then I went on to enjoy a couple of days at Lake of the Ozarks.