Into the Badlands

We drove north from Rosebud, South Dakota and picked up Route 44 west. We would rejoin US 20 in a couple days. 44 ran straight and true. Sometimes, as the above photo attests, the road stretches as far as the eye can see. It led us straight into The Badlands.

These photos show some of the Badlands but none of them show the true scale and depth of the formations there.

We drove the loop around the park and I managed to get some video as we drove.

We departed the Badlands just as the OSU vs Miami game was starting. We listened on Sirius radio as we drove west to Rapid City. We walked into a sports bar in the old town region and instantly met Jimmy, a transplant from Ohio. He insisted the barkeeper switch the TV to our game. Jimmy remembers every OSU football player in the school's history. He even recalls names and games of many of the big high schools.

Jimmy is a fast talker whose gestures are kind of like Beetle Juice but he sells massages, tours, and whatever you might be in the market to buy. At no charge he directed us to see Custer State Park among other local sites. His advice was right on the mark. He hopes to visit us in Marathon, Florida this winter.

Ranchers, Rodeo Cowboys, Gamblers

We rolled into tiny Stanley, Nebraska for a bite to eat and a little local color. The only food they make at the Central Bar is deep fried so we ordered poppers and onion rings, a decision we would later regret. Mandy was curious about a menu item labeled as 'breaded boob'. The taciturn cook wearing a cowboy hat didn't look up. "Fried chicken breast," he replied quietly. We had finally left corn country and passed into the world of hay farming and cattle ranching.
"Most of the ranchers are gone or in nursing homes," the sweet (after we prodded her with questions)  rotund bar maid told us. "The kids don't have no interest in ranching these days." She pointed up to rows of wooden plaques lining the support rafters. "These are the names and brands of ranchers that used to come in here. One by one, she announced the names on the plaques followed by "He's gone," or "he's in the home."

As we continued on US 20, we noticed a small road running along side 100 feet to the south. I decided to have a closer look. I turned into a connecting lane and took a photo of what I believe is the original route 20, now delegated to a jogging and bike path. Not surprisingly, we saw no joggers or bicyclists.

This is probably the road the my mother, father, Marc, and I travelled to visit Yellowstone back in the early 50s.

Hay farms have replaced corn as we travelled further north. When we arrived in Valentine, Nebraska we stopped to ask locals about places to camp and things to see. At a tavern, we met Maynard, a WWII vet and retired rancher who lived in northern Nebraska all of his life except for a stint in the Army.

"As a kid, I didn't know anyone lived a life different from me. I learned to ride a horse about the same time I learned to walk. I rode to school, to visit friends and family, to church, and everywhere else. I thought that everyone did that until I joined the Army." Maynard caught the tail end of the war and never left U.S. soil.

"When I spent two years in the Carolinas, I met black people for the first time. I loved those people. I have never had as much fun before or since." I smile grew on his face as he reminisced.

Mandy asked about mounting a horse. Did native Americans really teach their horses to let them mount on the right so that if someone tried to steal the horse, the animal would buck them off for mounting from the left.

"I lived on a reservation for two years and I never heard that," he said. "You always mount from the left. Although I once had a horse that wouldn't let anyone ride him except me. He wouldn't even let my father ride him."

Maynard told us about how he should have moved further south to farm corn. "They are all millionaires now down there. Once they perfected irrigation systems, they could grow corn faster than they could sell it. Up here, the sandy hills are too rolly to drag an irrigation system over it. But we have prairies up here where the cattle can graze. Further south they have to herd the cattle into feed lots to fatten them up."

Maynard's father, a rancher, did grow a few crops. "Sometimes the wind would blow near hurricane force and blow the sand out of a gully. We call that a 'blow out'. My father would go down into the blow out and drill a water well then plant crops. Contrary to what many think, the sand is full of nutrients and the crops grew well."

Maynard also told us about the rodeo cowboys. "If you get to be a really good horseman, you can make big money riding the rodeo. They make a lot of money then gamble it all away then go back to make more money in another rodeo then gamble it away."

"You ought to go try your luck at the Rosebud Casino just 11 miles up the road in South Dakota," he smiled. It was an ornery smile.

Mandy wanted to take Maynard's advice. Pictured here is the Rosebud Casino. She felt that her karma was going to give her good luck. She turned a $20 into quarters and chose her lucky one-armed-bandit. The trouble with gambling machines is that they don't care about karma. They are dogmatic random number generators. The machine's dogma collided with Mandy's karma devouring it like a pitbull tearing apart a Mini Cooper. Within an hour, her 20 bucks was dead and gone along the road-ma.

Corn, Corn, Corn

We drove north along the Iowa side of the Mississippi. We stopped in Bellvue to make a tomato sandwich and watch the river traffic at lock 12 (our son-in-law grew the tomato from seed-best we ever tasted). This photo shows the lock. On our drive through Iowa we saw Iowa corn, lots of Iowa corn and many wind farms. The video shows a typical farm of corn and energy. Most Iowa corn is converted to ethanol, also for energy.

The 'old man' (Mandy's retaliatory name for me when I call her Meemah - a babytalk substitute name for grandma. She hates babytalk ).

We camped that night north of Independence, Iowa at the best manicured campground we have ever seen. It is owned by a former farmer whose daughter and son-in-law talked him into selling the farm and joint venturing with them on the campground. After a year, the kids wanted out. Too much work and it ruined their summer. Let that be a lesson.
The woodlands in the background was a pleasant diversion from the miles and miles of corn fields. If you want to camp here, it's just west of corn field 1000 and just east of cornfield 1001.

This barn, like many here, have a sign on the side. Hollywood called them hex-signs to make dramatic scary movies. In reality, they usually extend a wish for pregnancy, for a bachelor farmer to find a wife, for a good crop. This is Pensylvania Dutch country and the sight of Amish families in their buggies is common. We saw five Amish children walking a counttry road, the girls in their long black dresses and bonnets, the boys in black trouisers and shirts with straw hats. We didn't ask to photo them. We've all seen Amish before. Aslo in this picture is more corn.

After we crossed the Missouri River into Nebraska. we stopped at a bar in the little town of Willis. This is outdoorsman country. One of the patrons, who was sitting nearby, shot this moose in Canada and brought the head back to his favorite bar. Bullwinkle, as he is called, produced 1200 pounds of meat and weighed close to an estimated one ton before dressed. You will notice that he has no cigaratte, party hat, or beer bottle anywhere on his head, certifying that he wasn't at a party when shot. The principle crop in Willis is corn.

We spent the next night in Randolph, Nebraska at the Cedar Motel. The nice people above, who run the motel, gave us good advice and great stories about old US 20. They say that it was originally a buffalo run which made it an easy path to convert to a road and later to the longest coast to coast highway in the US.

Next stop; Valentine, Nebraska - the Rosebud Casino - and the Badlands of South Dakota.

Off and Running West

On September 7th, we started our journey. We drove north from our summer home in Columbus to the old Lincoln Highway and turned west. It was a bright, sunny, and windy day with a high temperature in the low 80s. We passed through Beaverdam, Delphos and many other small towns built over the past 100 years along the original route of US 30. The greatest bonus of driving the old Lincoln Highway was the complete absence of trucks and gaggles of cars choking the roadway.

We made our first stop in Van Wert, Ohio at the Old South Tavern. We once saw a sign posted in a restaurant that read "Never Trust a Skinny Cook". One look at our barmaid/cook told us that we were in for a treat. She cooked up a thick baloney sandwich, burned a little on both sides, smothered in cheese, and dragged through the garden.

On the way from Delphos, Ohio to Van Wert we passed the Van-Del drive-in theater.

We also passed this old roadside attraction. It may have once had windmill blades attached at the top of the dome. I remember seeing similar buildings travelling with my family when I was a kid.

Like many town on the Lincoln Highway, Van Wert takes its heritage seriously as the above banner and this sidewalk insert attest.

We chanced upon this roadside church and graveyard. Nearly half of the grave stones marked the burial sites of children, all of whom died between 1875 and 1878, probably the result of a plague.

In Indiana, we saw this log cabin along the Lincoln Highway. It had been claimed and refurbished by a county extension agency.

The Lincoln Highway signs dot the roadside to confirm that the driver is indeed driving over history.

We stopped in the Down and Under bar in rural Indiana. They have old postal stamp vending machines that have been re-configured to dispense gambling tickets. Since the machine might be illegal I opted not to take a photo of the machines.

This photo shows the sheer delight in driving the old highways. You see no trucks, no heavy traffic, and inviting places to stop for a bite to eat while visiting with the local folks. Fields of corn and stands of trees grow right up to the edge of the road while train tracks run alongside. Often, we get the opportunity to wave to an engineer as a train passes by.

Mandy tries to steal an ear of field corn for a memento. Mother nature has her own anti-theft device. The stock wouldn't release the corn. She came back empty handed.

Table shuffleboard is a popular past time in taverns from Fort Wayne, Indiana to the heart of Iowa. We saw no dartboards, Foosball tables or bowling machines anywhere. Pool tables, however, still abound.

We followed the Lincoln Highway to the Chicago area where we spent our first night. On Wednesday, we left the Lincoln and motored north to continue our journey on un-named U.S. Route 20. Our first stop on Old 20 was here in Waterman, Illinois.

Small motels still exist along U.S. 20 like this on in Illinois although most have been converted to apartments.

Wind farms extend from central Illinois to all of Iowa. We could often see hundreds of these giants at once as we drove by thousands of acres of cornfields littered with windmills. As we drew close to the one in this photo, we estimated it to be at least 15 stories tall.

We crossed the Mississippi River at Clinton, Iowa.

Once on the Iowa side, we watched a tug position itself against the bow of a raft of 15 barges to guide the massive bundle between the bridge supports. The tug at the bow controls the bow by pushing back against the current and momentum in much the same way we might take a patient on a gurney down a steep ramp by positioning someone at the front to push back as well as guide.
More soon.

Mandy and I will be travelling again soon so I thought I might dust off the blog machine and try a few posts before we set off on a trip to the western states. We plan to leave in early September to follow the Lincoln Highway, US Route 30, which was the first transcontinental highway to be completed. As we approach Iowa we will jump off of the Lincoln Highway and motor north to Route 20, the longest transcontinental highway.

Much of the the original Lincoln Highway has been bypassed with a new four lane Route 30 but with the help of Google Earth and Google Maps we have discovered most of the country roads that was, for most of the 20th century, the Lincoln Highway. It starts in Times Square in NYC and passes through 11 states ending in Lincoln Park in San Francisco. We will follow it from Upper Sandusky, Ohio to just beyond South Chicago. By design, the Lincoln Highway doesn't pass through large cities because of the influence of Henry Joy, president of the Packard Motor Company. He wanted the highway to allow motorists to drive coast to coast without fighting the congestion of major cities thus improving their transit time.

West of Chicago we will pick up US Route 20, the longest transcontinental highway. US 20 leads directly into and through Wyoming's Yellowstone National Park. It starts in Boston and follows a path through Yellowstone ending in Newport, Oregon.

Along our route we will visit many old rural farm towns where we hope to meet the locals and perhaps hoist a glass with them. We plan to visit as many national parks as possible including, Mount Rushmore, the Black Hills and the Badlands of South Dakota, Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons of Wyoming, Salt Lake and Canyon lands national Park in Utah, and finally Monument Valley at the border of Utah and Arizona.

The video above is me operating the heart lung machine for the last time in September of 2009. Over almost 43 years I ran 'the pump' over 5000 times. Equipment failure, especially in the early years, was not uncommon and we had only five minutes to fix a breakdown or we would lose the patient. We never lost a patient due to malfunction in all of those years although we nearly gave a few surgeons a heart attack because they could do nothing but wait until we resolved the issue.

The video shows the roller pump that propels the blood to and from the patient, the control screen, patient monitoring screen, the anesthetic gas vaporizer, blood filter (just like the one in the fuel line of your car), the blood reservoir, the oxygenator (artificial lung), and lastly, the screen of the echocardiogram.

One Last Post

Many of you know that I lost another son on March 10th of this year which is why I haven't posted an entry since March 7th.

Matt died on March 10th after a nine year fight with colon cancer. He was 42 years old and leaves behind a daughter, aged 14, and a son, aged 11. His brother, Sean, died on March 11, 1996 at the age of 26. His cousin, Dr. Marcie Miller who was my brother's daughter, died a few years after Sean. The Millers aren't lucky with longevity. Our father died when I was 14 and we never met our grandparents which makes my brother and me ponder why are we still around.

But life must move ahead for Mandy, me, our other children, and five grandkids. Above is a photo of Matt. Below that are two videos of our sail down the ICW last fall. The first is a rollicking ride down the Albemarle Sound and the second is a view from inside the cabin while the boat was underway with our automatic steering system at the helm.

Karen and The Lounge Lizzards live at Banana Bay

The woman in this video, masterfully playing the 12 string, is Karen. She's not your usual Karen. She is a pilot, owns her own airplane, and is a remarkable musician. She was married to a podiatrist and has given birth to two children. Yes, she is a woman. People who attended the show pre-judged her. They assumed that she or he was a transvestite, a homosexual, or just some weirdo. I could even see some people twist their faces when they looked at her, as if they had chanced upon a dead rattlesnake baking in the sun. But Karen is none of the above. Mandy spent much time with her while I was gone for the weekend to visit family. Mandy learned the truth. Karen is different. Her husky voice and manly features result from a condition that occurred at birth, not from a choice to be different. It's not nice to judge people.