Here comes Andy!
He came from behind this cat tree, the one where we start the morning with Andy’s back and head massages. (He’s a good boy – all that shredded rope is his doings!)
He stopped by the kitchen cabinets. Doug massaged his back and “scritched” his chin and ears, even opened cabinets to encourage him, but he wasn’t having it!
Andy walked over to the open door, sniffed around, and then went to my bedroom to pout. He wasn’t happy I left him alone most of the day when I drove to Rapid City for my car appointment. He forgave me, yet I could tell that his feelings were hurt!
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I hate to see my little buddy upset but I have an annual trip to Rapid City for routine maintenance and incremental 10K VW-recommended maintenance on my VW. I just hit 40,000 miles/ 64,374 km on the odometer, so the 40K extras came due this year.
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Next, a few landscape photos from my trip:
It’s the Ponderosa pine forest that covers the Black Hills that has a blackish appearance from afar that gives this area of South Dakota the name.
South again in Northwest Nebraska, the lowering clouds over the tableland and the lone tree in the foreground define this part of the state. (Yeah! Yeah! There are flat places in Nebraska, but most of the Panhandle, the western end, is hilly.)
The clump of trees on the far left is a shelterbelt. After the Dust Bowl years in the 1930s, this became a way people saved the soil from the wind. Often you’ll find a farmstead and outbuildings nestled in these trees. Aside from stabilizing the farmland, shelter belts serve wildlife from great horned owls and pheasants to white-tailed deer and songbirds, among many other species, as habitat.
What the heck! This is my town’s big attraction, Carhenge. About three miles from where I live, I was happy to see it after a tiring day of making a 310 mile/ 499 km round trip. Home at last!
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I love my end of Nebraska! I came back after my US Army days in Germany and never considered living anywhere else. All these videos will take you a lot of time to view. I post them mostly for hardcore geography, geology, and history readers who are interested in new places, especially this one which is Andy and my birthplace.
These are just the highlights!