Continued from, Omaha: Landing in Flyover Country. September 10/11. 2021: Carter Lake, Iowa. I’d landed in Omaha but my airport motel was in a little enclave of Iowa called Carter Lake, just a short jet blast away from the Nebraska state line. Carter Lake, the only Iowan outpost located west of the Missouri River maintains …
A chapter in an occasional series of posts documenting an autumn 2021 road trip through the Midwest. Continued from Contemplating The Mystery Box. Out there, between Denver and Pittsburgh, lay a broad land I’d barely seen. A once vast grassland that had become countless square plots of cornfields and soybean fields, splashed with small towns …
Warning: Some sections of this post are rated R It’s three days before Christmas. A section of the parking lot at the local supermarket is covered in crunchy, dry pine needles. The Christmas trees that had been there earlier in the day are gone. Headed for the chipper and then the compost pile. Eventually the …
“Well, we’re not in the middle of nowhere, but we can see it from here.” ~ Thelma & Louise It seemed that way sometimes, those times when we got a little bit lost and found ourselves on a long stretch of a desolate county road. It’s on those roads when you haven’t seen a passing …
Thursday, May 20, 2021 continued. Next stop, Oatman, Arizona. We enter Arizona, through the town of Mojave Valley. I slow down at the Welcome To Arizona sign and ask Cora if she’d like me to take her picture standing by the sign. She declines. “It’s too hot,” she says. It is that. The thermometer on …
It’s been alleged that COVID is in recession in America, and with that news, along with the arrival of summer and increasing vaccinations, Americans are looking to rid themselves of a side effect of the pandemic; let’s call it hometown-itis. Whether they contracted the coronavirus or not, most Americans have exhibited symptoms of hometown-itis; alternating …