WELCOME to Between The Lines

This is my chronicle of my occasional travels about the country. I started it in 2010 for my trip on my 2005 Harley Road King Classic for Big Daddy's Gulf Coast Gypsy Tour to New Orleans...Read below to find out about it! NEW REQUEST FOR READERS! If you are following this blog, sign in as a follower! That way I get to know who my audience is, which makes it more fun. Thanks!

In 2011 its the same destination, and its another Big Daddy Gypsy Tour, but on a different bike (my new Road Glide Ultra) and via a different route. This year is going to be in preparation for a 'Travels with Charlie' trip sometime in the future --so its camping along the way, and reporting as I have energy and internet connections.

Periodic posts will appear below, latest first. The
"Pages" down at the bottom have some information of more general applicability or interest. Enjoy! HippieDave

Thursday, June 26, 2014

The Elephant in the Room...

OK, it is something that we all are aware of, but nobody ever mentions.  And sometime we have to sit down and discuss this question as adults:  Is Kansas really necessary?
And I don't want to pick on just Kansas.  If you look where the spiral spine of your atlas is, there is a swath of states going north to south, each of which is equally unnecessary: North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and...sorry Texas, but y'all would benefit from losing a little weight if we slimmed you down some.

I have spent the last two days, and put only 750 miles under my wheels, mostly in Kansas and Nebraska.  Usually on an interstate network I can do better than this, and believe me--if it were someone's front yard I was driving by--I'd be impressed.  Very pretty lawn! Did you use sod? and, hey! Nice vegetable patch!  But really, do we need this much 'yard'?  My apologies to North Dakota, as I am dismissing you based on circumstantial evidence (your proximity to the others) and the movie Fargo, but I have driven extensively in and through the rest on my list and I contend fervently:  they are unnecessary.  Lets just get rid of them.  Maybe Canada would be interested? Eh?

Or, if one wished to keep the number of stars on the flag the same, and not disrupt the balance of powers in congress, well--we could just shrink them (like using your fingers on your IPhone) to the width necessary to spell out their names vertically on the map.  All of the people presently living there could still fit in, and your friends there would be a lot closer to you.  Just take a map of the U.S. do a bifold thing, and you'll see:  it works a charm.  Now I admit Texas has a bit more population to worry about, but you can't tell me Texas can't afford to lose a chunk the size of Kansas without anyone even noticing!

Mostly, what this would do is remove the last two days from my memory, as they never would have happened.  My God! the tedium!  The grass!...nothing but grass and cows.  I will dream tonight of riding a tractor mower forever in rows, back and forth, back and forth.  An occasional water tower offers the hope of a town on the horizon, but --alas--the tallest structures for miles around other than water towers are silos.  As near as I can tell, other than to provide a place for gas stations to situate themselves, there is no reason for towns here, and without the interstate trucking industry and me, there would be no towns.

One thing they do have here in plenty is weather.  Other than winds, which I would say were following me around on this trip were it not for the fact that they are always blowing adverse to the direction I'm going, I have been able to skirt bad wet stuff.  (I did get soaked to the skin in a rain and hail storm on Tuesday, but that was back in Illinois and was over before I knew it, or could do anything about it.)   I stopped today for lunch and read the Wyoming State Paper (no towns are big enough apparently to have their own papers) the Wyoming Tribune Eagle.  According to the front page headlines, I missed just yesterday 1) hail the size of baseballs that would have destroyed my motorcycle and 2) a tornado that would have made the hailstones irrelevant.  So, I count my blessings, and proceed westward under sunny skies and into winds that justifiably gave the conestoga wagons their nickname the Prairie Schooners --I'm surprised the oxen et al could even keep up! Or the that the Indians could even find them.  I can see Chief Crazy Horse now saying "Avast mates! Heave to!"
!



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