Effing Awesome

Lucy, Martie, Ani and a dark stranger

If we meandered our way to New Mexico, we have been making a beeline straight back to New York on the return trip.  The first day of driving included several harrowing hours of driving through very high winds in Oklahoma and Kansas that resulted in a huge dust and tumbleweed storm.  At first we were amused by the tumbleweeds, which are just like cartoons of them.  They bounce along the road like chubby bunny rabbits.  When the chubby bunnies began crossing the road by the thousands (no exaggeration) it was less funny.  Some of those bunnies were the size of small sheep and I didn't fancy having them hit our car.  It isn't that Earth-friendly.  And the dust!  At times, it was so thick I could see only about ten feet ahead of me.  Yikes.  Give me snow.  Give me ice.  Give me heavy rain.  But please, leave your dust and tumbleweeds in Kansas.

Mercifully, the winds subsided slightly and we left the powerfully flat landscape for a slightly more forgiving one and we made it to El Dorado, Kansas.  Can't speak to whether it really lives up to its name since we collapsed into bed and left early the next day.  Yesterday was a 12-hour car ride through the rest of Kansas, Missouri (where we had lunch at a truck stop where they allowed smoking - poor Lucy was in tears at the horror of it), Illinois and into Indiana.  We had a field day when we came to signs alerting us that we were only miles from a town called Effingham.  Finn suggested their town motto should be:  Effingham is effing awesome!  What can I say?  We watch a lot of Jon Stewart and we were all a bit giddy from being in a car for hours and hours.

With Effingham behind us, we entered the red state of Indiana and even made it past Indianapolis - somewhere along there we entered Eastern Standard Time.  I guess it is part of Indiana's libertarian spirit to not put up an signs alerting you to that fact.  Tax payer money shouldn't be spent on signage about time zones!  Let people pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and figure it out for themselves!  The Founding Fathers didn't need time zone signage.  This isn't some kind of Nanny State!

Anyway, it wasn't so easy to find supper in Greenfield, Indiana, especially when it suddenly became 9:24 p.m. on Sunday, but we were treated very nicely at a local restaurant that was six minutes from locking their doors.  Hint to plant-eaters, however:  when you see the words "chili nachos" on a menu at a place called Montana Mike's Steak House, they don't mean the vegetarian kind.