Day Four, Part V: World's Biggest Ball of Twine

This is going to wrap up the vacation slide show. Think of it: back in the day, I'd have had to get film developed and converted to slides, conned you into coming to my home on the pretext of sharing a meal, then stuck you on my sofa with a lukewarm martini and then bored in on the 1021 pictures I took.



Thanks to the advent of high speed internet, you can be bored to tears anytime you like, from the privacy of your own home. You don't have to pretend to like my cooking, you don't even have to know me. It's perfect!

The final leg of our tour was to head through fog so dense visibility was under a quarter mile in hopes of reaching the World's Biggest Ball of Twine.




All of the supporting business structures related to the ball were closed. We couldn't tell if for the day or for the season. The town isn't what you'd call lively: you can get gas there, but only by swiping a credit card at the pump.



The ball of twine is, well, it's big. It's not even really a ball anymore, at least not if you expect a ball to be spherical. It's rounder than a football, I guess. It's probably a real hassle trying to turn the sucker on its side to even out the winding at this point. The ball is a monument to compulsive behavior, the ultimate pointless collection. If it was the second largest ball, would we even have come?



Cawker City does have a lot of art on display in windows, reproductions of various famous paintings to make the downtown look a little less dead. And it does have, to my amazement, a real, working phone booth. I don't mean a pay phone, though those have gotten scarce, I mean a proper phone booth with a folding door and all that.



I haven't seen one of those in thirteen years, and I know it was that long because when I saw that last one in Lincoln, NE, it was enough of an oddity to register a distinct memory.



On the way home, we grabbed pizza at a buffet in Topeka, and at some point on US 24, we passed an old fort with little gun windows all around and an apparently functioning Yugo parked next to it. It's rusty, but the plates were current. Haven't seen a running Yugo in even longer than I haven't seen a phone booth.



It was a fun trip, obviously my camera got a workout. It's striking the differences you can see from town to town. Places like Lucas, that has so much going on it hardly fits in the town contrasts sharply with a place like Leonardville. Nothing against the latter, I'm sure the people there are nice enough, but instead of having a plethora of folk art, a Czech gift shop, or even a giant ball of twine and a phone booth, Leonardville appeared to have only beer joints and liquor stores, roughly one for every three or four run down houses. I'm no teetotaler, but it's depressing to see the only local flavor is 90 proof and the local cultural attraction is satellite TV.