Little Roadhouse on the Prairie

Bid a fond adieu to Chicago’s urban torture. The GX460, packed with four months of clothes + Mrs. Wilson in her pet taxi, heads west for an overnight in St. Joseph, MO.

 

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Tempting visits, boyhood home of Walt Disney, Marceline, MO., or the Pony Express’ original station,where recruits are Wanted: Young, skinny, wiry fellows not over eighteen. Must be expert riders, willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred , ruled out both Mrs. Wilson & this driver.  Although an orphan, under eighteen, Wilson is neither a fellow nor an expert rider.

Both stops are passed over for the more intriguing, Glore Psychiatric Museum, which was once featured on the Science Channel.  The exhibits are thought provoking, embarrassing, and unfit for children under 30, i.e., they violate current HIPAA standards of privacy. Force-feeding Thorazine, Mellaril, and lithium carbonate was marginally effective, unless rendering a patient comatose was the intended outcome. Mental health treatment moves slower than a cold snail, although lithium ion batteries have found a place in motivating fast electric cars.

Tesla’s 9 feet of not linoleum, but ‘lithonium’ flooring

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Off the interstate grid to avoid Kansas City, a town that nauseates two states, we head to KS route 177, the Flint Hills Scenic Byway. I can recall my mother and her two sisters, after their husbands returned from war, singing in unison with Judy Garland, “The Atchison, Topeka, & the Santé Fe”.

Atchison is over the next horizon.

Council Grove, KS

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Luring the weary travelers, eighty miles of the Tall Grass Prairie National Preserve, near zero traffic in either direction, few ghastly billboards, and neither wind farms nor immense feed lots to fulfill the national appetite for fossil-free fuel and Big Macs.

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Writing is as simple as moving a paintbrush; the landscape becomes the canvas.

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Mesmerized by the stark loneliness massaging the satellite radio; my favorite station, Canadian folk ballads from Quebec, all in French. Nothing is more intoxicating than a buttery voiced tenor whispering her lyric ‘Country roads, take me home, to the place I belong’…..

Les routes de campagne, ramenez-moi à la maison

À l’endroit où j’appartiens

while accompanied by a guttural, male bass softly challenging with ‘West Virginia, mountain momma, take me home’…..

Virginie-Occidentale, maman de montagne

Emmenez-moi à la maison, les routes de campagne

In the distance, the civil twilight slips below the horizon and a low, grey overcast sky forms the shape of a discarded mattress. Only the distant profile of an abandoned farm, a rusted oil pump long since dormant, cushion the prairie from the sky. The creases and folds, the color, evoke a distant memory of a 2 story, small town hotel; Ford City, PA, 1958.

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On alert from a perch atop a bare, black oak, a red tailed hawk swoops, talons in a death grip, the right on the throat, the left to the gut of an infant rabbit, today’s luncheon. What a chef might describe as ‘bêbe lapin ala sushi’, much like the blabbering Wolf of CNN describing Donald & Hillary in his Situation Kitchen. Real or imagined, nature, as always, a metaphor of life.  images

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The muse continues on 177, a right-hand turn away from not one, but two, Austin-Healey bugeye sprites ~ 1959, and a 1940 Ford business coupe. What are the odds…?…about equal to spotting Elvis in the Strong City, KS grocery.

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dscn3644The late John Denver was unsurpassed with his version of “Rocky Mountain High”, but I still prefer the French to ‘take me home’.

Inspired by Ken Burn’s epic, the Dustbowl, which brought drought, dust, disease and death for nearly a decade, our next stop, the No Man’s Land Museum, Goodwell, Oklahoma.

But first we have to cross the bridge over Contrary Creek (true), on a road called Middle of the Road (also true) where only the cows come home.dscn3657

 

Mrs. Wilson, in the spirit of the season, wishes you a reasonably enjoyable holiday, in spite of the world’s ills.

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Appetite for Solo

 

A 2016 trilogy, Colorado and Bust

Subtitle 1958 M-Benz, 190 SL roadsters on a 3000 mile R/T

“Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”

Mark Twain ~ 1907 

Dateline: Idaho Springs, CO; Tommyknockers Bar

Peeling from the pack, Mapquest indicates I’m 958 miles from Rochester, MN. Reuniting with Lynn at Mayo Clinic in a few days, the open road celebrates both anticipation, random musing and wiggle room in case the roadster breaks down.

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Or should you happen upon a fellow traveler at an Esso station in 1958

 

 

 

1st, convening with the cars became a smorgasbord of personalities, an exceptional travel value, member support, and encouragement to drivers of these little beasts.  Consider it in your future; you’ll never be disappointed.

End of pitch.

Adios Denver, a short stretch of I-70 heading east, a reminder to return to the blue highway soon.  Being followed too closely by a motorist, left rear quarter, he is in that unseen isosceles triangle spread between the two, too small mirrors.  At age 16, learning to drive, the instructor warned us to ‘watch out for Helen Keller‘, when referring to the “blind spot”.  Today, he would be pilloried by the A.D.A. and sacked by the superintendent of schools.  That he was the best teacher, ever, would have not been considered.

I slow, he slows, I accelerate, he velcros, then at last, passes.  His co-pilot is taking pictures of the roadster on her I-phone.  Nearly flattened, I should be flattered, although I feel the victim of a drive-by shooting.  This is new tech…old tech was a thumbs up and a beep.

Old tech is better.

The stark plains landscape provides miles of power lines.  Standing silent sentries, as if marching soldiers at ease, tethered together by an electric umbilicus.  Stoic.  Technology may soon doom them to antiquity, an industrial relic overshadowed by buried lines, fiber optic cable, satellites, wind and solar farms.

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Goodbye REMC, hello wireless.

The desolate agriculture here, grazing land, to feed our addiction for beef, the In & Out Burger, MacD, and 5 guys & fries.

Forget the Druids’ unhinged rocks in Wiltshire, UK ⬇

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No pickle, lettuce, mayo on a sesame seed bun. Face-to-face with rural Kansas’ Route 36, very own Hayhenge ⬇

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As beautiful as Claude Monet’s grainstacks in Chicago’s Art Institute ⬇

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Beauty is in the eye.

I awaken before the rosy fingers of dawn on a new day.  Nearing a town of 600, Pretty Prairie, Kansas, the genesis of the civil sunrise emerges, at 60 mph, the view can best be described by the image;

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The reflection on the roadster bonnet, engulfed in the bosom of the fenders is exhilarating.  I begin to hum the Woody Guthrie refrain,  🎼  his soliloquy on this land is your land;

When the sun came shining, then I was strolling
In wheat fields waving and dust clouds rolling;
The voice was chanting as the fog was lifting:
This land was made for you and me.

The balance of this final day was colorful.  A drive down Johnny Carson Blvd. in Norfolk, NE, Tom Brokaw’s boyhood home in Yankton, SD, and a brief stop in LeMars, IA, ‘ice cream capital of the world’ to taste sample at the home of Blue Bunny.

Blue Earth, MN boasts the statue of the Jolly Green Giant, a very large well-known vegetable, and Austin, MN, not to be confused by vegetarians, home to Hormel Meats and the SPAM museum.

Arriving in Rochester, Lynn welcomes me with a warm embrace after a week apart, knowing I’m refreshed, exhausted, and hungry, and asks “where should we go for dinner”.

“Anywhere I can get a lunchmeat sandwich, steaming dish of green beans in melted butter, and a dish of vanilla ice cream”.

“That’s odd, I was thinking of going to Chipotle”…oh well, welcome home.

 

“In life, don’t wait, the time will never be just right”  Mark Twain 

 

©insightout2016

Not the Hilton, but It’ll Do

A 2016 trilogy, Colorado and Bust

Subtitle 1958 M-Benz, 190 SL roadsters on a 3000 mile R/T

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“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”

Mark Twain 1916

Miles slip by, encouraging random thought. Road burn and fatigue are ameliorated by the gentle rumble of four cylinders, soothing flap of the fabric top, and static from a radio receiving only a single AM station….Christian radio. The combination is a stimulant equal to a monster 5-hour energy drink, freed from caffeine, so help me God.

Signs on the roadside provide constant entertainment. Passing LaClede, MO, the billboard notes the birthplace of General J.J.Pershing, where on this very day, 13Sept2016, he would have turned 156 y/o. Although no longer alive, having fought the Sioux wars and then leading forces to victory in WWI Europe, he survived 88 years.

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Remarkably, he made the news in Feb. 2016, when a U.S. presidential candidate made reference to a myth about old ‘Black Jack’ Pershing. Although the story turned out to be a fable, I’d wager the general would have relished the acknowledgement.

156 years beats 15 minutes of fame, like a flush over a straight, every time. Wouldn’t I love to have him riding shotgun with me today ?

Our three roadsters pass through Atwood, KS, a burg of 1000, self-proclaimed “Pride of the Prairie” and note its sole accommodation, the It’ll Do Motel, and hence, this essay. Intrigued by the clever title, I vowed to stay here on the return trip and I did. For $66, it beat any Route 66 motel.

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When was the last time you had a key to your room ?

Room eight was a winner. It featured the 100 year background, enclosed within several window box wall displays, of the local Williams Bros. grocery.

Both Williams boys died years ago, but the three generation Braxmeyer family is carrying the torch into the 21st century. Being drenched in supermarket history is soporific, resulting in a good night’s sleep. Who needs Ambien© when bananas are on sale for 56cents a pound.

Add, too, a star to the rating card, for the toilet paper prep in the popular paper airplane motif.  Which strikes me as a miniature adult diaper, in waiting.

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And one more for the hand towel/washcloth, a work of folded art.

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The drive entering eastern Colorado is pleasantly boring, however the stunning windshield horizon of the Rockies is dampened by tortuous bumper-to-bumper Denver traffic, high temperature, and oxygen starvation causing Parker’s baby blue to overheat. A push downhill, an hour cooling off period with Stella Artois in the Hyatt Regency (for us, not the car) and we’re off to the Winter Park Vintage Hotel.

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⬆ Following bug removal, dispatching of leaves, the carcass of a dead bird, the nasal passages are polished and aligned for inspection on the runway.   What Germans term reduktive nasenchirurgieENT doctors a rhinoplasty, is quite simply, a nose job.

Long live the It’ll Do,

and to the upscale duplicates;

Choice® Hotels, Marriott®, Hyatt®, and Hilton®,

It’ll Don’t.

 

©insightout2016