Drove thru Oshkosh today and was just getting there at lunchtime so I drove up to the Museum of the EAA. Cell phone shot. I had very little time so I didn't go in or even get out of the car.
Connie, my GPS lady chose a route home right through the middle of the USA! Only one mile off the main highway was a spot designated the geographic center of the USA. One mile? I can handle that if only to say I was there. I listened to the chorus of "recalculating" several times, parked, shutoff the engine and reached for the camera gear. There is a nice plaque and monument marking the spot as well as a picnic table, a small chapel (maybe to pray that you can find your way back to the main highway?) and some trees planted to offer a backdrop and windbreak. Most interesting to me was the road leading to the center. it appears that the center of the USA has a strong gravitational pull and has folded the road drastically. The 400mm lens helps heighten the effect of the folds.
Driving from one customer to another yesterday I passed fields of corn rows loaded with cranes. There were literally thousands of them. Most were well away from the road. This particular group was maybe 50 yards from the edge of the road and didn't fly away when I stopped to photograph their mating dances. Maybe the dance had them occupied enough that they didn't mind me being so close. I was under a time restraint so didn't stay as long as I wanted but then it was entertaining for those 20 minutes I did sit and watch them dance!
The Texas trip took us straight into Turkey, Texas, population of about 500 and per capita income of under $20,000 according to the last census. Home of Bob Wills. For those who don't know him, Bob Wills was known as the King of Country Swing. His music was very popular when I was a kid living in Texas. I didn't like it then but I do now, can't quite figure that one out. It was cool to ride around with my uncle in his '55 Ford convertible and listen to Bob Wills on the radio. I was about 10 years old and except for the music thought this was awesome. Now that I am older and wiser(?) I still think it would be a cool thing to do but with gas pushing $2 a gallon and the price of a '55 Ford convertible hiting maybe $50,000+ who could afford it.
The memorial is very cool. The images of Bob are very realistic with the exception of the missing Jack Daniels bottle, a fixture at the clubs where Bob and the Texas Playboys put on shows.
Turkey, Texas is not along the route to anywhere but is on the route to everywhere. I felt like every kids dream here would be to make a name and get to somewhere else. The town is not very vibrant and is run down, but then so are a lot of other small west Texas towns. Years ago, oil was king here and the small towns were booming. Now the oil is about gone and the small oil boom towns are dwindling. There is a small resurgence based on residual oil and new ways to extract what is left but that is left to big business and not to the small time producer like T. Boone Pickens in his early years. Maybe this area will be a good location for a wind farm or a solar collector?
Kopje is a Dutch word meaning roughly "Cap". All across the Serengeti there are kopjes, the result of millions of years of volcanic dust and ash filling in the valleys between the hills and mountains. These "Caps" have all weathered into smooth, rounded boulders and hills of granite, intrusive igneous rock. In SW Oklahoma lies an ancient mountain range of granite which has been exposed to weathering for eons and has taken on the look of the Serengeti kopjes. I was amazed to see such similarities between the terrain in Oklahoma and what I had seen in Tanzania. I kept looking for the herds of wildebeest and zebra and the stalking lions on top of the kopjes. The shot above is a granite hill in the middle of a farmers field near Quartz Mountain State Park in Oklahoma.
