Yes, it was really great meeting everyone. Hopefully things will improve in the world and more people can make it next year because such things as car rental fees will be more reasonable.
I still have a few days before I am back in Ohio.
We had to spend yesterday trying to get my aunt some emergency medication since hers was left in our room. That took a while to sort out with the dingbats who work at the call center of the pharmacy benefits provider. The pharmacists at a couple of the big chains that have branches here have been helpful as have the staff at the hotels.
Deadwood, however, apparently has very limited FedEx and UPS pickups.
I’m pretty exhausted and have miles to go, literally, before I can get a good sleep. I should go to bed soon. I probably won’t be able to post any kind of lengthy report on my travels until after I have slept in my own bed a couple of nights.
I don’t know about you, but one thing that haunts me is the masking of the little kids I saw at Mt. Rushmore, Crazy Horse, and the other tourist hot spots.
While the vast majority of people are not masked, there were an uncomfortably high number of kids under 12 who were. The signs said the unvaccinated should be masked and kids under 12 can’t be vaccinated. I don’t know how many parents thought they would be stopped or get in trouble if their kids, who are and clearly look to be ages 4-11, weren’t in masks. There were kids in that age group who were not masked, but I would say half were masked.
In only a few instances were others in the family masked.
If I believed I could “get in trouble” for not making my kid wear a mask, I think I would have the whole family wear a mask because it would suck for my one kid to be the only one to not get to breathe the free air.
(Of course, upon seeing other kids the same age not in masks, I would de-mask everyone.)
I would really be afraid of the neurosis that could develop in my kid if he or she had to spend the family vacation un-masked when the rest of the family got to be mask-free. What kind of resentment could that cause in a child?
And the family photos! I saw families taking pictures where the one kid was masked for their photos!
I didn’t see many masks during my visit, but it seemed like the people that wore them were mostly afraid of everyone around them. I agree, that sets up a psychological issue for young people whereby showing ones face in public becomes taboo (much like in an islamofascist country - witness the ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures of Iran).
Interesting encounter at the hotel in Paducah yesterday morning - I was in the elevator with the cart full of my belongings, taking them down to the truck to load back up. The elevator stopped at the 2nd floor and a woman and her son (both unmasked) were there. She was quite apprehensive about getting on the elevator, and asked me if they could get on, claiming that they had both been vaxxed. I said “sure, get on”, and said that I didn’t really care about if they’d been vaxxed or not. Turns out that she was more worried about my reaction than anything. She said that this was the first time that they had been away from home since the plandemic started.
I think that a lot of people, as they start seeing others without masks, will start shedding their masks also.
Side note - I was the sign you mentioned about the mask requirements at the gift shop at Mt. Rushmore. My visit in the shop - it wasn’t busy at the time - I saw only a couple of people with masks on. Most were ignoring the requirement. Even the guy at the door was very lax about it.
I got back to good old, boring, Ohio last night.
Some initial cursory observations about my trip that I may or may not expand on depending on interest.
In no particular order:
1. North Dakota is worth going to despite the boring drive from Fargo to Bismarck. It is an even more boring drive than boring drives in Ohio and very, very flat. That being said, there are nice rolling hills past Bismarck.
Dickinson has an excellent dinosaur museum with fossils and lots of cool rocks from all over the world. The Japanese restaurant in town is actually pretty good and has an actual Japanese hibachi chef.
Medora is a nice little tourist town. I thought the Teddy Roosevelt National Park was prettier than the Badlands National Park in S.D.
2. I do not regret staying in the Deadwood/Sturgis area as opposed to Rapid City, despite it being harder to get to Mt. Rushmore. It was very picturesque and different than your usual motel off an interstate.
3. I highly recommend taking a tour. I would have never been able to handle the one-way tunnels of the Black Hills National Park or curves in Needles Park on my own, or known about some of the roads to take. And seeing the narrow rock formations in Needles is not to be missed. Custer State Park lodge has an excellent buffet.
4. I am very glad that I went to Omaha. In fact, I would be willing to fly out for a 4-day weekend to see more of it and take bus tour. I had no idea it was such a big city. I had the best meal of the trip there, and it wasn’t beef, since I don’t eat beef.
5. People in the small towns of Illinois are quite normal. They are actually more normal than the same sort of people in the same sort of places in Ohio, although there might be more Trump signs in Ohio. But the mask thing wasn’t as pronounced.
I had no idea Peoria was large enough to have an international airport.
Okay, I have to stop here. I’ve piddled too much of the day away on FR and have to unpack, get groceries, and do other stuff.