Entire Road Trip Photo Collection for our Gentle Reader

Ah, Gentle Reader, I know you love my prosy....prose.  But feast your eyes on Monica's photo journal where she edited the hootenanny out of her 600 photos of the trip, and you will get a good sense of the progression. Now, is Route 66 a world-class shutterbug or what?  With my words and her images, the next road trip is going to be for our BOOK!  We don't know what kind of book yet.  One whose research requires lots of travel to picturesque small towns, we hope.


Life in Wabash and Indiana

It's hard to be succinct when all is new.  How to describe this place?  Well, there are oldsters and youngsters and hipsters, like everywhere, but there are noticable differences.  I see young, solid marriages straight out of high school, three kids and going strong.  In fact, young people seem more responsible here than back home. I see lots and lots of white people.  In fact, I very rarely see anyone else.  Chicago with its 2-color system was a welcome taste of diversity.  (Chicago is a very clean and friendly city but like Wabash, everyone seems to smoke).  I see mayors who have the time and graciousness to make themselves available and meet with us for an hour.  I see landscaping and home maintanence designed specifically for a very, very rough winter (Vinyl Siding!!  It's everywhere you look).  And blue spruce trees sprouting up next to the hydrangea and marigolds, which looks really out of place in the summer, but the spruce is all you'll see come December).  I see plenty of mid-nineteenth century architecture, not just the occasional building.  I see people talking when they meet, not rushing off to something else.  When your commute is literally 90 seconds, you have time galore to stop and appreciate your neighbors.  I see Amish people selling their own produce and baked goods at the farmer's market.  They're wearing their traditional garb and/or bonnets, but have a Chevy to cart the stuff and their 8 children back home again.  I liked them a lot.  My pie is better, but not by a very wide margin!....I see gravestones written IN GERMAN, lots of them from 1830-1870, when it seems they started using English.  I see no 1-child families.  I am sure there are some, just haven't met them yet...I see gasoline for $3.35 and even as low as $3.25 (my town it's about $3.45 right now).  I see first-run movies for $5, that's the adult price.  But our theatre has only 5 showings a week, all on the weekend.  You want a movie midweek, get Netflix.
And yes, Corn.  Corn Corn Corn Corn Corn.  And soybeans too, but mostly corn.   In Indiana anywhere there's not a building or a parking lot, something either grows there naturally, or someone puts a boatload of corn seedlings in it. 
This town's got it going on, for its size.  Secrets for small-town success (my uneducated opinion after only a few days here):

Substantial private local investors
A County Seat
A brand-name gym like YMCA
Old-timers who went out for an education then came right back to their hometown
Good weather for tourists (it's nicer than you think: clear, warm with enough humidity to make the air so soft)
Lots of historic buildings, and an organization to find grant money to fix them up
Active community of artists (there are a lot here)
A big local company like 5-hour Energy Drink (in our case, it is actually the company that makes 5-hour Energy Drink).  Also, the Ford water meter box manufacturer and a few other anchor corporations)
Arts in the schools.  Yes, the schools have art teachers.  I bet they have PE, Music and Health, and whatever else we had to cut back in California.

Will report more as I learn more.  And will add pictures as soon as my super-crashed computer comes back from the Geek-in-Residence.

More About Florence

Florence KS and other small towns on the Scenic Byway

The reason we got to Hillsboro and found out the difference between a sleepy small town and a bustling small town (having a university) was that 66 plotted out a scenic byway route through the center of Kansas so we got a snootful of farms, barns, cornfields, and small-town main streets.  The above is an old mill; some 'young bucks' went goofing around in the little waterfall and dug out wheels and other mechanical artifacts from the mill's time, according to the local old-timer.
In front of the Second Empire (1860's or so, for you who aren't archi-geeks) Cottonwood Falls county seat building.  The Cottonwood river runs down the street, giving us our first opportunity to stick our feet in a river, and the town seems to have some nice economic development on its Main Street.  They are financing some of it with benches and historic looking light poles, sponsored by locals: 'In loving Memory of John Smith' or something on a little sign.

 Monica went insane photographing barns in various states of usefulness, all throughout KS.  This one's a winner!