One weekend last year I was looking for something to do (for free) and noticed an announcement about the Kansas State Fiddling and Picking Championships which coincidentally will be conducted this year on August 23-24 in Lawrence, KS. My appreciation of music is limited, but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate someone’s superior skill and I have to say that the performers at last year’s championships were amazing. And I did like the music. The atmosphere was picnic-like, several stages, bring-your-own-chair-or-blanket-type seating, food vendors and souvenirs – the usual. Plus a good reason for a nice day trip to Lawrence. There are many various instruments fiddle, guitar, banjo, pretty much anything with the strings. Weather permitting, I will be driving there on Sunday the 24th around 10-11 AM. Oh and did I say it was FREE?
Here are some videos I took last year:
I also took plenty of pictures (click to see the set):
But even if there was no picking or fiddling, or food, or people, my trip would have been fulfilling anyway because I saw this guy with a railroad tattoo on his face and a matching hat (click to see detail) :
It was like seeing Jesus on a common household item but much, much better.
*The better-looking photos in this post are taken by my kid.
I usually try to give my travel posts clever (in my opinion) or rhyming titles, but no rhyme comes to mind to name this report about my trip to Minneapolis.
Five months out of the year Minneapolis is an exciting, great-looking, interesting city 500 miles to the North of Kansas City. During the other seven months it closely resembles the Fortress of Solitude – a snow-covered and icy hellhole where people are using an elaborate tunnel-like system to move between the buildings without getting a frostbite. It also houses the first sign of Apocalypse – The Mall of America.
If you are driving to Minneapolis, the longest part of your route passes through Iowa – Khrushchev’s favorite state. Iowa is famous for its old people and various, not always pleasant, smells along the highway. Iowa’s population is so old that just by driving through we temporarily dropped the average age in the state to 68. To fight the smell problem Iowans installed gigantic fans in random places.
All soldiers take photos, some of them are not pretty. If I said that only Germans enjoyed taking especially cruel and gruesome photos, I would not be very honest, having seen some of the images from the wars that followed, including Iraq. When I saw a link to an expired Ebay auction where these photos were sold for over a $1000, I just thought I’ll do my part of posting them for nothing. No matter how ugly, they have some historic value and for many people in them, these photos may have been their one chance to be seen by the future generations.
Caution: Some of the photos below are gruesome, it’s your choice to look at them.
This post should be titled “I have a camera too, you know…”. There are people in this town who are really good at taking pictures, and then there is me. I don’t set an aperture and exposure on my camera, I just push the button. That doesn’t make me any less eager to share my photos. Plus I have better captions.
