Poco Mountain Girl

This morning El Dorado and I kicked into gear bright and early. (I kissed sleep goodbye at 3:30 A.M., and he was only a couple of hours behind me.)

We leaped into our gleaming (though somewhat dusty) yellow stagecoach, strapped the papoose in, and galloped westward across the misty Kansas prarie!

Kansas boasts a good bit of history. It’s so plain and brown, at least it has something to offer. We passed through the state capital, Topeka, and Manhattan, home to Kansas State University. They call Manhattan the “Little Apple”. Very little.

It seemed we went through town after town of museums and historic monuments, passed Fort Riley, and saw tributes to General Custer,  Brown vs. the Board of Education, etc. Interesting things from bygone days.

One 8-mile stretch of  highway was labeled as the first stretch of interstate in the U.S! Here’s a quick glimpse of that stretch:

After a couple of hours, we finally pulled up to the sleepy little town of Abilene, Kansas, which proudly boasts the title of  hometown to Dwight D. Eisenhower. That’s pretty much their claim to fame, I think.

That and a Dairy Queen, and a giant John Deere store. I noticed that people here like to ride their tractors through town.

I thought this little train station was kind of cool. It seems to still be in operation.

We reined in our coach in front of the Dairy Queen to strike up the deal we’d come all this way for. The Spaniard did a bit of fancy wrangling…and then presented his squaw with the fruit of his labors: a 13″ Macbook Pro.

Yes, I have a new computer, sweeter than sweet; my very first Mac.

For the techies among us, it has:

2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor

4GB Memory

250GB hard drive

…and many other bells and whistles I’ve yet to explore! (Can you tell I copied those specs from the box? Because I really don’t know what it all means.)

For the more artsy among us, it’s a Mac. Aluminum. With a picture of an apple on top.

In my defense, I told him not to do it. Told him to wait, that my PC tablet works fine for now. Told him to get the computer he needs for work first. But did he listen? Of course not. That’s what makes him the Spaniard. And being the crafty tradesman that he is, of course he got a rocking deal.

We hopped back into the stage and off we went again, this time headed for home…with the Little Apple. Very little. And did I mention? Very sweet.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 21st, 2010 at 3:13 am and is filed under Culture and History, Earthy Possessions, Lion Man, Travels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.