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Monday, October 21, 2013

The Chronosynclastic Infundibulum of the Midwest (Welcome to Lucas)





I took a road trip last weekend, and my usual blogging approach would be to try and digest all the photos from it, weave them into a story here and make it into a single post.



It's an approach that works well for, say, a trip to City Market to get groceries on my bike. But a trip to Lucas, Rock City, Post Rock Country in general, Mushroom Rock, Marquette's motorcycle museum, Council Grove, Lyndsborg (Ja!), camping at Wilson Lake and so on, it defies my formula. For one thing, I haven't even taken a good hard look at all 800+ pictures I took on this trip.



Here are pictures of the gateway to weird that is Lucas. Two I took as I arrived, another as I was on my way to set up camp by Wilson Lake. I didn't make it to Wilson proper this trip, the tip about Rock City over by Minneapolis (KS) from a waitress at a diner in Lincoln (KS)—I'm aware that these town names are mostly associated with other states—caused me to veer out of the path of the Czech capitol of Kansas.



I'm going to do my best to parse this trip out into logical subsets. There's the Garden of Eden in Lucas, but there's also the Grass Roots Arts Center, the Deeble house, a water tower right out of What's Eating Gilbert Grape, a meat market, Czech stone masons chiseling fence posts out of the stone, bizarre rock formations, wind farms and I don't know what all.

I'd been far too long out of Lucas, it was spring of 2008 last time I was there. They've added an enormous toilet, and the Flying Pig we didn't get to last time is no more (the owner died a little over a month ago). Which is to say I'm glad I went back and I'm sorry I didn't do so sooner.

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