Billy The Kid's Summer – A Break From The Casinos

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

Wow what a summer. Remodel projects, employee vacations and lots of out of town trips kept me incredibly busy. I did take a week off to have a little vacation with my bride. This year we did a camping trip to an area that we had never traveled to.

During our camping trip we drove about 1000 miles with 700 of them being on two lane roads. Two lane roads mean only one thing, rural America, and that’s where we spent our time.

The first thing that I was really aware of was the absence of any small farms. We only saw the left over remnants of them. The abandoned houses, barns, and other buildings left to whither in the middle of larger fields with the crops growing right to the front door of the old homes. We did see lots of crops; in fact the most amazing thing that we saw was wheat fields. BIG wheat fields. There was a 30 minute span driving 50 miles per hour where we saw nothing but wheat. There were no cars, people, houses, trees, animals or anything else except for the wheat. That wasn’t amber waves of grain it was an amber avalanche of grain.

One morning we drove into town and had Penny down at the diner fix our breakfast. Penny knew we were from out of town since we were the only people in the diner that she wasn’t on a first name basis with. This was the sort of place where the "regulars" meaning everyone cept us would just go behind the counter for coffee or whatever else they needed. I guess that’s just what rural America is like.

There was this place that we went through that we nick named Wavy. Everyone that we saw waved. They waved from the car, the field, the front yard and the sidewalk. It was pretty cool, we just waved right back. I heard that they wave a lot in other parts of the country too; they just don’t use all of their fingers in some of those other places.

People might be friendlier and know their neighbors a little better in rural America. The big corporations have moved in and bought up the small farms and consolidated but for the most part things seem to be just fine. The rest of us don’t need to worry about having enough to eat. There will be plenty of bread, eggs, milk and meat, I know, I saw it. Now we might not be able to afford the fuel to get that food to us but that’s another matter.

Oh yea I almost forgot. I went to a local casino but it had been closed for over a year so I couldn’t play.