Sunday, June 24, 2018

Birthday Resolutions

It's summer so that means it's time for road trips and vacations with your family that you normally may not be able to do while your kids are still in school. Over in Rex Morgan, M.D., two characters are on a road trip themselves. I don't know why and I don't care. What I do care about is that they drove through my neck of the country this last week. Let's get started.

It seems as though they are doing "roadside attractions" and not a "things to do" vacation. So basically they are doing things that might be found in the WPA Guides of the 1930s. So instead of going to Kansas City to see the World War I Museum, Union Station, or hanging out in the Power & Light District or Country Club Plaza, they are going to stop and look at a parking garage, a giant gun with an orange tip, and, maybe, a cow on a tower.

I don't know where they were in the Sunday strip but probably not too far from Liberty, Missouri and they are eating again? Kansas City can't come soon enough.

It's a common misconception that the building with the giant books is the Kansas City Public Library when, in reality, it's the parking garage across the street. That doesn't make it less cool or less of an interesting way to beautify a normally boring-looking building but make the distinction.

"Are we done with Missouri?" That's what I ask after I spend a significant amount of time in Missouri. Also, where else were you going to go? The only way out of Kansas City without driving through more of Missouri is to enter Kansas.

And, yes, that teepee is a real thing. TeePee Junction, once a roadside motel park, is location just north of Lawrence. It's really kind of cool and worth at least a drive-by. Marked on the teepee are lines for how how the water was during the 1951 and 1993 floods.
It's odd that the Evel Knievel Museum is already on roadside attraction tours already. It just opened, like, last year and isn't even technically what I would consider a roadside attraction.

And then they arrive in Topeka for the Evel Knievel Museum and we see nothing about Evel Knievel. They go to Truckhenge and stop by a busy Topeka intersection before continuing to head west to Wamego.

Only in a work of fiction can everything you want to see be easily accessible along the same highway. Goodland is a mostly straight shot along I-70 from Wamego, where the Oz Museum is, while Wichita is south along the Turnpike but you can reach Garden City from there along Highway 400. You know what else is near Garden City? The In Cold Blood house. Now that's an attraction!

I guess driving around Kansas is over. I don't like it when people are reminded of someone's name by the name of something. "Millie's Diner. I knew a Millie." Well, it's probably not the same one since you make no indication you are somewhere you've been before. But since this is a work of fiction, lo and behold, it's the same damn Millie!

I been a little lax in posting things that aren't regularly scheduled but I'm hoping to start getting things up in the next week or so. I am also working on several research ideas for a book idea I'm trying to flesh out. If you would like to support my writing or research you can buy me a cup of coffee on Ko-Fi. A big thank you to those who have given.

Gladys must have also decided to be more of a bitch for this birthday. Look at that face in the last panel. There's a part of me that thinks she has somehow convinced Brutus that it's her birthday over the course of the last six to eight months just so she could say all this because it all sounds very scripted. Very scripted.