Karen and I just got home from Enid, and man! Are we glad to be home!
We stopped by Wichita and spent a coupla hours with her mother, had a pretty nice visit. I think that Karen confused her when she was telling her about our upcoming cruise... which I don't think that I've hardly mentioned yet. I'll get more into that later... Anyway... the trip home on the turnpike was amazing. I've never seen that road so busy! When we got to the southern entrance to get our tickets we saw that they only had one gate for northbound traffic... they were sending cars in the outside lane thru the pikepass gate after a guy would give them tickets, and they had four gates open for the southbound traffic. Which extended, bumper-to-bumper, for five miles. Five miles! This is unheard of in Kansas! Anyways, northbound was pretty packed too, but there wasn't just one exit, so it wasn't really that bad, I guess. So we visited with Betty until 17:00, then headed for Topeka. Same nasty traffic, and the lines at the gas stations were fifteen or twenty cars long. We didn't need gas, but we needed coffee, and we went into a rest stop and there wasn't much of a line for gas, so we got gas and coffee... but there wasn't any place to park after I got gas, and karen had gone into the c-store to get coffee and pop, and by the time I got parked and went to the bathroom we missed each other. And I had parked where she couldn't see the car... I'm sure that she had visions of me going off and forgetting her.... Anyway. We slept in seperate beds last night, and both of us slept pretty well, I think. I got up around 09:00, I think that Mom got up around 08:00, and Karen around 10:00. Karen and I debated about going to Winchell's for donuts or McDonalds and McD's won out, Karen got us some good McStuff... Mom had already eaten, I guess, she couldn't be persuaded to try the McStuff that Karen brought home... Mom called Aunt Bea, and I talked to her for a coupla minutes; pretty discouraging... about the first thing that she said was, "Dougie, your Mom and I are heading for the promised land!" I almost told her to leave my Mom out of it, but I didn't. After that, Mom and I went out to get her some paint and plumbing stuff and some fertilizer for the pecan tree... When we got back, Karen was sitting out front reading, enjoying the day. In the meantime, she'd got us all packed up and ready to go. But first... we had to pick some more pecans. Yesterday's winds had knocked a lot of them down, but shaking the branches with a hoe produced bushels more. We all three spent about a half-hour picking them up, my back was achin' by the time we were done. There is something really fun about picking pecans up off of the ground. It's a lot like finding money, which I have done a lot in my life... So we came home with a coupla sacks of Pecans for cracking and eating throughout this season... And, after I wrote that last sentence, I had to go find the nutcracker and a bowl... they sure are tasty right off of the tree! They are thin-shelled and come out of the shell in one piece very easily. Probably very fattening, too. Dammit, everything that's good is fattening. Some kinda screwy rule that came along with the world, I guess. I'm pretty tired, I think that I'll put Saturday's entry up tomorrow, 'cause I think that I need to go to sleep now... Today's picture is of the sunset Friday in the flint hills when we were heading south on the Kansas Turnpike. Karen was driving, and she stopped for me to take the pictures.