Tag: rural

A couple weeks ago, we spent the weekend in Wamego, Kansas visiting with Lonnie’s beloved stepmother, Laura, who at age 92 is in poor health. The two full days we were there, we spent time in the mornings and early evenings with Laura and her daughter, Sue, caregiver extraordinaire, but in the afternoons we went out on some adventures. We drove to Manchester to visit the family graves and the site of the old burnt out family home, as we always do, but this time we decided to add an additional cemetery to the itinerary. Lonnie’s great-grandmother Carrie Funk Wolfe, who died when his grandmother, Irene, was only twelve years old, was buried in the Catholic Cemetery in Vine Creek, only 7 Miles from Manchester. I don’t remember how long it took to get there (an hour? 2 hours?), but what were listed as roads on Google maps, turned out to be narrow rutted dirt roads. Despite us having been raised in Kansas (Lonnie) and small-town Chico (me) and living in Arizona, which is full of dirt roads, we felt like city slickers in this area. The closer we got to Vine Creek, the more confused we became, but we got there! However, we chose to go a different way back (why?), and the directions on Google took us to a road not really there and a road ending in a gate. We basically followed our noses and eventually found a main (dirt) road that was familiar and took us straight to Manchester and the highway back to Wamego, only a half hour late.

I love the scene above which shows the beauty of Kansas farmlands. I took it to my weekly photo group and talked about converting it to a black and white, which everyone agreed would not work. Because I have been working with black and white film recently (details eventually in another post), I have been experimenting with converting more photos to black and white, as well as editing my film photos- so here is my moody version:

I think I like it better in some ways than the color version, although the color image is certainly more true to the scene.