Taste of Shawnee

Our favorite sushi restaurant (not my favorite, necessarily, I'm a sucker for Bob Wasabe, but the restaurant Corinna loves to go to that I do too) is in Shawnee. But Sushi Mido doesn't participate in Taste of Shawnee for whatever reasons. I personally believe they should, some of the crowd that comes out for this is probably in the demographic of people who think sushi sounds scary, but if they could sample a roll only risking one ticket, I bet a good percentage of them would find out they love the stuff. And if you can't enjoy the rolls from Sushi Mido there's something dead inside you.

But plenty of fine eateries do participate. Some are chains, some are local restaurants that have a few locations, some are mom & pop type joints. I'm guessing they're all owned or run by Rotarians since it's a Shawnee Rotary is who puts it on. Which is how I end up going, Dad's a Rotarian and I end up with quite a few free tickets, which makes it a heck of a cheap date. I bought a few out there, but when four people can basically pig out for seven dollars, that's a deal.

And being that I'm the new recipient of a Judgement with a Stay for some medical bills, I'm all about the cheap dates. Everybody knows that if you send $100 a month to someone you owe a big medical debt to, they'll keep it out of collections. Everybody knows they won't (or maybe even can't) sue you if you're making that good faith effort to pay. Ask Leonard Cohen about what everybody knows, it turns out everybody is misinformed.



And I have good insurance by today's standards. So now if I pay some lawyers $200 a month (and presumably keep paying KU Med $100 a month as well), they won't garnish my paycheck. This is what winning looks like in America today.

Anyway, back to the happy stuff. Taste of Shawnee. It was a lot of fun. I recognized from RAGBRAI the signature sound of an antique John Deere one cylinder engine cranking ice cream. Corinna was super excited when I showed up with a dip of it, I was like, I didn't see it, I heard it. About two thirds of the way through the route every day on RAGBRAI there's an ice cream vendor that sets up with those putting, halting motors and I like ice cream (whereas my wife loves it), but after fifty miles on the bike in Iowa in July, ice cream is like a miracle.

Mo found pizza, cotton candy and turkey sandwiches, which means she was pretty much in hog heaven. She drank a smoothie, too, which see seemed skeptical of at first, but then once she'd tasted she realized it was pretty awesome stuff.