Smoky Hill River Festival

The Smoky Hill River Festival was in Salina this weekend. This is a great way to start the summer.

This is the Smoky River and the ubiquitous (being everywhere at once) floating big round bales. Part of a good art display is using the right word to describe it.


The sand sculpture was awesome.

Waiting for Adam's 50 yard dash. He did great--really ran hard.

We listened to three bands. My favorite was definitely Rain Dogs from Kansas City but then I liked their style.

Salina does this festival right. They allow coolers with drinks (no alcohol of course). There is plenty to do for the kids and the food was delicious. There were artists from all over the United States. The buttons were $10 at the door (even cheaper if we would have purchased earlier). Still, the best bargain around.

This is a short post. Need I say more?
Picture by Linda

Other people's treasure

There are two things I look at daily, most normally at the end of driveways--mailboxes and trash.

The trash guys and I have a friendly relationship although we battle for territory. I certainly like it if I can get ahead of them as they are slow and smelly. I know they don't want to be behind me because I make more dusty stops. Thankfully, it is only one or two days here and there on the route.

I have several customers who regularly clean their toys or garage, then lean the nicer things against their trash containers for anyone going by to pick up before the truck comes. It makes my day interesting although I never stop. This practice, however, lead to today's incident.

The first day I noticed the Jeep was trash day & it was sitting close to the containers. My buddies must have thought it was just too good to toss into the compactor truck. Then I was off for four days. When I returned yesterday, there it was with a big "free" sign on it. Just in passing, I mentioned it to Dan last night. This is what I found when I got home from work today....

Home again

We had a great visit to Colorado. We especially enjoyed our mountain camping trip. I marvel how well kids do camping. They are naturals. We had a beautiful camp spot with aspens and pines. We were lucky as the area near Woodland park was almost full. There was a bear sighting several days earlier so the camp supervisor instructed us to keep all food inside our vehicles. I was relieved we did not see or hear any movement. Of course, I slept like a log and a bear would have had to beat on our door to wake me. There is something about mountain air.

We blew into Kansas around noon yesterday—or to be more exact, Kansas blew into us. We had a very brisk head wind almost the entire trip home. Our little Trekker did not like it and our gas mileage showed. We had a great time and it was definitely worth a little extra in gas.

We stopped at Salina to visit our family there. We decided to accompany them to Adam’s T Ball practice. For some reason, I left my camera in the van so I missed some cute pictures. Adam is four as are the other members of the team. At one point, I thought we were watching tackle football when they all went for a hit ball. We were proud of Adam for listening and following the coach’s instructions. Aaron’s team is doing well but they didn’t have a practice or game scheduled last night.

We arrived home around 10:45 pm. Dan was tired, I was tired and Skye was absolutely beat. We left her at our usual dog sitter. Their four boys must have played with her the entire time. When I got home from work, Dan said she had hardly moved all day. It’s a dog’s life.

Sunday morning h ike. Pikes Peak is in the background.







Colorado wildflower