Congratulations to two of my graduate school friends, Kevin and Maddy! They got married this past Saturday, October 3rd in Lincoln, Nebraska. They had a beautiful ceremony at the First Presbyterian Church near downtown that brought tears to many people’s (Elizabeth’s) eyes, and they had a hell of a reception at a winery in the small town of Seward. Elizabeth and I were honored to get an invite from the two of them. Things actually worked out nicely for me – the weekend coincided with my long weekend after mids. We made a three-night trip out of the occasion and saw some friends, saw some sights on the prairie, and saw plenty of good food and drink. I thought it’d be fun to write a quick summary of the weekend while it was still fresh in the mind. Let’s break it up into a group of short (no more than 500 words apiece, Nolan!!!) stories.
The Skittles
There’s nothing that warms my inner Type-A more than having a schedule to eat my candy. A couple of nights before we left for Nebraska, Elizabeth and I went to Target for our annual covid and flu shots. You get a $5 coupon for getting your shots from them. That coupon (for me at least) went directly toward Sour Wild Berry Skittles. I counted out the number of Skittles in the bag. There were 182. Google Maps said our total driving distance for the weekend (exclusive of side trips) was 910 miles. That breaks down to exactly 5 miles per Skittle.
Yes, for the fun of the bit I looked up the exact spot that was 5 miles from home. Yes, I ate the Skittle at that point. No, I did not continue eating exactly 1 sour Skittle per 5 miles for very long. That wouldn’t have held up very nicely early in the morning anyway.
Trivia Night With James and Jack
The drive to Lincoln is about 6 and a half hours. Elizabeth and I could make that in a day on Friday and make it back in a day on Sunday easily, but did we want to do it that way? Our good friend James lives a little under halfway between the origin and the destination in Wichita. We invited ourselves to spend the night at the house that he rents with my old roommate Jack. After however many years of them living up there, I’d still never seen their house. So this was an exciting side quest.
We left after Elizabeth got off of work on Thursday afternoon. I’d finished up mids early that morning, gotten a few hours of sleep, taken Scipio to his kennel, and then spent most of the afternoon packing right up until (and a little after) she got home. There was some need for haste. James wanted to meet up at Crooked Gnome Brewing in Wichita for food truck + trivia night at 7:30. As a fan of foods from a truck, beer, and trivia, it was an easy “yes” from me.
Elizabeth and I pulled up to the brewery at 7:00 in a cold, windy downpour. This might sound like a complaint but it isn’t. You see, Oklahoma has been suffering through one of the nastiest droughts I can remember here. We’d gone almost 8 full weeks between meaningful rain events before we’d finally gotten about an inch of rain the night before. Every moment Elizabeth and I sat outside the Mediterranean food truck, with my umbrella feebly keeping the rain away from my puffy vest, I felt more alive than you could imagine.
By the way, this truck did a Mediterranean-style poutine. That’s fries, lamb, harissa, the works. The beer was pretty good, too. I celebrated “it’s cold and wet and October 1” with a coffee stout and an Octoberfest.
James, Jack, and Erica arrived a little later, just in time for trivia. The five of us (team name: Jason Missed Trivia) were thoroughly mediocre at trivia, it turns out. Erica and Jack did most of the heavy lifting. Stephen arrived halfway through the event en route to his hotel for the night, but he and I were major disappointments. As my mom would say, though: what’s most important is we were having fun with friends we never get to see. And it was! It was very fun.
But unfortunately my lasting memory from trivia night will be the final question. For some reason, this particular trivia host has a Final-Jeopardy-like setup where you wager your points on the last question. The category was “Sports”, and we were solidly back-middle-pack, so why not throw it out there and see what stuck? The host, your typical brewery-trivia-host-hippie type, said the answer to tonight’s clue was “someone he’d heard of”, which I ended up weighting too much in the end. The question: Which Hall of Fame MLB hitter has more strikeouts than anyone else? I thought of the correct answer – Reggie Jackson – almost immediately, but Elizabeth had never heard of him. So we settled for Hank Aaron, and I learned to my horror that everyone else got it wrong.
That one will sting for a while.
A House With No Pillows
James and Jack were proud to show us their rental home in Wichita. It’s a pretty nice one-story house with a big backyard (put in a garden, boys!), a large basement for James’s gaming and Jack’s model-train-collection needs, and neat decor pieces. But they are not defeating the “bachelor pad” allegations entirely. The funniest evidence of all was at bedtime. Elizabeth and I offered to bring an air mattress and stay out of their way, but James has a setup in their basement for when he’s on mids (Jack has birds and they get loud during the day). He insisted on sleeping there and letting us use his bed. The only issue is that apparently James only has enough pillows in his house for him to sleep somewhere at any given moment. Elizabeth and I had to bring our own pillows.
I’m not complaining, for the record. Coming out of mids, it can take me a long time to break my sleep schedule and return to normal. James’s mattress was quite squishy and Elizabeth fell asleep immediately. It just made me laugh a little bit.
A Work of Pop’d Tart at Homegrown
When James suggested going to Homegrown in downtown Wichita for breakfast on Friday morning, Jack and Erica were all but foaming at the mouth in agreement. That made for a pretty strong endorsement of the place. As it turned out, their words were all too true. Elizabeth and I had three truly exceptional meals on Friday, but this may have been the best.
It started with the outstanding service from the staff. Our waiter kept coming by and checking on us. She was real fond of the word “friends” to describe us, which usually isn’t my cup of tea but was apt in a place like this. The pot of decaf was exactly what I needed. As for the title to the section: yes, this restaurant had something called “Pop’d Tarts”. They are what they sound like – delicious little pastries with homemade icing that I personally could have eaten like 6 of.
Meanwhile, my main course – the Three Little Piggies sandwich – came on perfectly toasted bread and had a delicious garlic aioli. I didn’t know it yet, but this was the day of the aioli in my life.
Elizabeth and I weren’t in a huge rush and the company was good, so we chatted until it was time for Erica to go to work. When you talk about “underrated parts of this trip”, meeting Jack’s girlfriend is pretty high on the list. She’s a cool person and I would like to give her my whole-hearted endorsement. Once she left, the remaining four of us found a coffeeshop for Elizabeth to order a ($10!!!) crappy latte from, since her’s in the picture above wasn’t enough apparently. And then, it was time to move on.
For all the time I’ve been in Oklahoma, we haven’t spent much time in Wichita. This was a definite argument to come back again.
The Tallgrass
Northeast of Wichita, you end up deep into the heart of Kansas’s Flint Hills. The Flint Hills have a special place in my heart as perhaps one of the most beautiful spots to drive through during the spring green-up. They’re also a great spot to catch a tornado, I’ve heard.
Elizabeth and I made it up to the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve a little after 10:00 on Friday morning. The previous evening’s rain had dwindled to a sheet of low, fall clouds this morning, which in turn had given way to a bright and sunny morning between Wichita and here. According to my non-comprehensive itinerary, we had a couple of hours to explore and hike the park before making our way northward to I-70 for lunch. Do you need more than a couple of hours to see the Tallgrass Prairie, anyways? It is, after all, just tall grass.
The parking + facilities were pretty impressive for a little, out-of-the way preserve. As you’d imagine, the visitors to an NPS site like that are disproportionately the “Van life” types who are retired and on their own quests to visit as many Park Service locations as they can. Elizabeth and I don’t quite fit that bill, but maybe one day we will. Despite the impressive-looking facilities, there was only one ranger on duty in the Visitor’s Center – he noted that short staffing that day was why there were no ranger-guided hikes when a couple of little old ladies asked him.
Otherwise, my main thing to report on the Visitor’s Center was a rather exhaustive breakdown of tallgrass prairie ecology. If you ever need a resource of all of the different types of rattlesnake that can bite you out there, I know the place you can go! And if you go there and are surprised to find a tick on you later, then sorry buddy. That’s on you for not reading the signs.
“Bison behaving more aggressively than usual” is getting pushed to the side here. As Elizabeth noted, “Maybe they’re getting angsty because of how hot it’s been”.
Hikin’ to Bison
Elizabeth and I asked the sole ranger what he would do with an hour or two. He suggested hiking the Scenic Overlook Trail out to the bison pasture. You don’t have to go far to see them inside the fences – and as an added bonus on the soggy landscape, the trail is wide gravel.
And so we went for a stroll. The grass at the Tallgrass Prairie wasn’t the vibrant electric-green that I love to see in the Flint Hills in May, but it lives up to the “tall” name (especially outside of the bison pastures where there aren’t giant lawnmowers standing around).
It was a great day for a hike. The sun was out but the wind was still whistling out of the north with the first true fall temperatures Elizabeth and I had felt this year. We could have stood out in those conditions all day, flushing the last two months of brutal heat from our memories. The scenery was a stately sort of monotonous. There were rolling hills everywhere apart from the little river valley that the Visitor’s Center sat in with green-brown grasses whistling and rippling. If you looked closely enough at the grass, you could find little prairie flowers embedded in the sea of bluestem and gramma.
Almost without conscious thought, Elizabeth and I made it two miles out from the trailhead. It was a slight uphill but not enough to work up a sweat. Once we passed through the cattle guard and electric gate to enter the bison pasture, there were numerous wallows right alongside the trail. Right now, those wallows were filled with two things: hoofprints and water. There was a lone buffalo down the hill from us, but it took about a mile before we saw hikers stopped along the trail. In front of them were several dozen brown smudges. We’d found the Tallgrass herd.
Old stories from the Santa Fe Trail talk about how the Southern Plains bison herd, when the travelers found it, extended across the prairie as far as the eye could see. There would be nothing but a roiling, seething mass of those brown smudges over every hill. This herd represents nothing more than a sad ghost of that glorious past, not even enough biomass to call it a “remnant”. All forms of conservation are worthwhile, but we should not deceive ourselves about what the conservation constitutes.
On a brighter note, the two of us walked back down to the Visitor’s Center hand-in-hand. The sun passed high noon in the early-fall sky. We still had hours of driving to go; as much as this had been an idyllic spot to spend a few hours, it was time to move on.
(Should have put my puffy vest back on to avoid the grey-on-grey).
Beans and Raspberries Together?
About an hour north of the Tallgrass Prairie sat the next stop on our itinerary: Manhattan, Kansas. If you know me, you know that I love college towns. There’s something so neat about visiting them: the stadiums, the bookstores, the neat restaurants, the college students. Maybe I should be sick of college towns after living in Norman for a decade, but going to somewhere new always gets me excited.
Our lunch spot of choice on this sunny afternoon was the So Long Saloon just east of campus. Kansas State must have been having parents weekend or something, because everywhere we walked there were sorority girls and moms. Luckily for us, there was one booth open in the saloon. It was set in this beautiful corner bar building with ornate ceilings and a big, dark wood bar like you’d see in a western movie. The affect was perhaps ruined by the fact that the TVs inside were blaring some insipid ESPN on-campus show for that night’s Virginia Tech game.
Neither of us was all that hungry after that insane breakfast in Wichita, but the one thing I really wanted to try was a Manhattan specialty: raspberry bean dip. You read that correctly: raspberries, black beans, cream cheese, whatever other flavors, all baked together and served with tortilla chips. It was really, really good and we’ll be having it again soon at the Meister house.
Elizabeth and I should have just shared an entree though. Neither of us came close to finishing.
Go Wildcats
As they say: when in Manhattan, visit Bill Snyder Family Stadium. We didn’t have time to walk around the campus like I would have liked, but there was a neat bookstore over by the bars that we stopped inside. After that, I drove us across campus toward the football stadium because you never know when you might just be able to walk inside the field (it worked for me at Wyoming!). The drive to the stadium nearly drove Elizabeth nuts as a navigator. Every turn brought us deeper into some residential parking lot. But we eventually got to where we were going.
Perhaps one day we will be back for a game. Seems a little less likely with Oklahoma and Kansas State no longer conference rivals, though.
The Noise You Don’t Want to Hear
Spirits were high after lunch. Sure, I was driving through the classic afternoon food coma, but loud music and good conversation can overcome that. I’m serious when I say that I was just thinking about how fun road trips are and it’s a shame that Elizabeth and I don’t do them very often anymore as we entered Marysville, Kansas, about 80 minutes short of Lincoln. There was a big UP locomotive in the center of town in an idyllic-looking park. Elizabeth asked, “Do you want to stop?” She’s not one given to flights of whimsy, and I should really take her up on them. After a moment of hesitation, though, I shook my head. It was already past, and it would be nice to get some rest before our evening plans… I was still chewing on that decision when I stepped on the brake approaching the lone red light in Marysville… and heard a noise from the rear brakes that sounded like tires on gravel.
Elizabeth and I looked at each other. That’s not normal. Had we imagined it? But no, when I pulled into a parking spot in downtown Marysville, the noise repeated itself. This time I winced. It was coming from the rear wheels. That’s how a perfect day can get ruined really quickly. And to be honest, we were in a pretty bad spot. It was 4:00 on a Friday afternoon. Who would be open and available to look at a car? Were we safe to finish the drive to Lincoln? Was I going to have to stay in Lincoln for a few extra days to get the car worked on while Elizabeth headed back to Norman on Sunday with someone else? All of those thought raced through my head as the miles flashed by out the window. Finally, by the time we’d reached Beatrice, I made a decision: that wasn’t a noise I could ignore until we got back to Norman, no matter how much easier that would make my life. Elizabeth took the wheel so that I could desperately try to find a mechanic that was open on weekends in Lincoln.
The good news was that one existed and was still open for another hour or so. The bad news, when I gave them a call, was that there was “no way we can fit you in this weekend. We’ll take down your information in case there’s an opening…”
I never heard from them.
At this point Elizabeth made the suggestion of the weekend. No surprises there, she’s the smartest cookie around. “Try calling the Honda dealership”. Duh! Why didn’t I think of that? Unfortunately, when I called the dealership, the guy there said that the service center was only open for a few hours on Saturday mornings and that they’d be closing for the day at 5:30. We could bring it in this evening if we wanted, but there was no guarantee they’d be able to look at it tomorrow…
The Trip Hits a Low Point
It was 4:45 and we were on the outskirts of Lincoln. There was just enough time if I navigated Elizabeth right to the dealership on the southern end of town. So of course the moment I pulled up Google Maps, a Gemini ad popped up in the very 15 second-span that we would have needed to change lanes to save a bunch of time. Elizabeth did heroic work to get us through rush hour traffic without grinding the brakes too badly, though my face was in danger of permanently being frozen in a wince if I didn’t change my facial expression. We arrived at Honda of Lincoln about 5:10. The first employee in the Service Center asked “What do you need?” in a brusque manner similar to the person who answered the phone call. As I started to stammer out our issue and why we were in such a pickle, an older gentleman – his nametag said Dave – told the first employee that he would handle me. Dave and I spoke for a few minutes. He admitted that it would be difficult for them to do much on Saturday morning if there was something seriously wrong with the brakes. But if we were willing to leave the car there, he promised to take a look at it in the morning.
My shoulders sagged with relieved tension. I thanked him profusely. Dave had a rather relevant question: “Do you have someone who can pick you up?” Obviously, he anticipated the answer to be no given that we were 8 hours from home. But fortunately for me, I knew that Stephen had taken a more direct route from Wichita earlier in the day and was already in town. I gave him a call (actually a couple of calls, since he was at the State Capitol building) and asked him if he could come and rescue the two of us. He promised to be there right away.
Meanwhile, the Service Center at Honda of Lincoln was closing for the day. Dave showed me a key dropbox so that we could wait with my poor car for a little longer until Stephen made it across town, and told us that the showroom would be open until 6:00 and we were welcome to wait for him in there. To be honest, the 20-minute sit with Elizabeth in complete silence (I could feel her frustration with the situation) was not my favorite of the wedding weekend. In fact, it was decidedly an un-favorite period.
Just as Elizabeth’s frustration was about to boil over into her calling an Uber, Stephen pulled into the rapidly-emptying parking lot in his tiny little car. Now the fact that James had no pillows was significantly less funny as it contributed to the clear issue that we wouldn’t be able to fit everything into Stephen’s trunk. We prioritized “things you can’t do without” – suitcases, backpack/work bag, our wedding attires, and left the rest in the car (Dave promised we could stop by in the morning before golfing with Sam to grab anything else).
Rescue and Reset
Stephen was staying at the same hotel as Elizabeth and me, which made his rescue mission a lot less inconvenient. I did feel bad that he had to cut his sightseeing trip short, but at least he was heading back to his room as well. We made it across town with the sun sinking in the sky to the Fairfield Inn and Suites by the Lincoln Airport on the west side of the city. Our room was ready with no issues (though I have to say, the luggage cart we got was the single worst luggage cart in history. It was like if you took a normal luggage cart and then hacked 2/3 of it off and just left a single pole on top of a tiny platform. Who asked for this???). The room was large but surprisingly unfurnished. Not even a side chair, as Elizabeth noted.
Whatever. We don’t travel for the purpose of seeing the inside of 3-star hotel rooms. Initially, I had suggested canceling our plans for that evening since we didn’t have a car and just finding somewhere close by to eat. Elizabeth prevailed upon me to make sure we followed through and got the chance to see Lincoln the way it was meant to be seen. This was her second-best suggestion of the weekend.
Because as it turned out, we had a lot of fun left to go in Kevin and Maddy’s wedding weekend.
