Thanksgiving 2010

Forget the cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie for this year’s Thanksgiving. The only turkey we saw was one on a diner’s head in the Village Inn in Colby, Kansas.

              Gobble, Gobble

The gentleman was proud to tell us he had enough similar hats to wear a different one every day of the month. Can you imagine? I think it’s fortunate there’s a holiday for him to feature Tom Turkey.

Bob and I plus my sister Judy spent the day driving east from Denver along I-70. With a promising weather forecast we decided to make a road trip to central Illinois for a special family event. Limited holiday dining options in western Kansas found us having a noontime breakfast at a Village Inn.

We stopped for the night in Abilene, Kansas. The helpful desk clerk at our hotel made several calls trying to find an open restaurant – to no avail. After a drive through town we opted for a “To Go” pepperoni pizza from Casey’s General Store. Thankful and mighty glad to indulge in something hot.

With a desire to chalk up mileage we didn’t take time to stop for photographs but we’ll remember the day with mental images: an every increasing number and size of grain elevators plus covered mounds of additional grain awaiting sale or storage, fields girded with stone fence posts, a lone working aged windmill with hundreds of 21st-century wind turbines on the other side of the Interstate, tall church steeples raising above the plains, and a thousand birds rising as one from a barren cottonwood.

A very different, but pleasant Thanksgiving. We have just as much to be thankful for as if we had indulged in turkey with all the trimmings including pumpkin pie.