Blog Archives
antique
Ness City is the kind of place where there’s a building nicknamed “The Skyscraper of the Plains.” And it’s four stories tall*.
To be fair the SOTP is a pretty fantastic building, made from stone and full of grand architectural details. There are other once-elegant buildings in town which makes me think the place was once a wealthy town.
So of course I spent most of my time in town checking out the truck with a carpet, carpet padding, and a chair. It was very nice.
Ness City, Kansas
photographed 9.5.2024
*Or three. It depends on which Wikipedia article you’re looking at. The SOTP also has a basement, so who even knows what’s going on with the floor-count.
it didn’t feel like a glacier
My very favorite thing in Jetmore, Kansas, (population 770) was the way the sun had baked and then cracked into pieces the sign that said “arctic glacier.”
You know how I am…
Jetmore, Kansas
photographed 9.5.2024
el martinez service
I’ve been this place a lot of times but never even gave it a second glance. So maybe I missed seeing when it was open, seeing what the local customers were doing.
Or maybe, it’s been closed so long that if I had noticed it before now it would have looked approximately like this.
(Reason 1 to go back over and over to the same place.)
Truchas, New Mexico
photographed 9.3.2024
fence decor
If you take the back roads, sometimes you’ll end up driving down into a valley with a tiny town at the bottom and that also feels like maybe you drove all the way into another place, another time. And maybe you’ll stop there for an hour or so. And maybe you’ll feel an overwhelming sadness as you leave, knowing you’re returning to the same place, the same time that you’d just left.
Villanueva, New Mexico
photographed 8.31.2024
frigid creme
We’d planned on having lunch in this little town in Kansas but were nearly through town before we saw anything that looked like lunch. Just as we were about to give up all hope we spotted a little hamburger stand called the Frigid Creme, right there on the corner of East Long Street and North Wichita Avenue. A smartly-executed high-speed turn and there we were – ready for an old-school burger!
The place is called the Frigid Creme, which is the model name of the particular burger-restaurant kit that the original owners purchased in the 1960s. I’d tell you more about that, but my Google search took me to a company that makes “premium embalming cosmetics” (also known as “mortuary makeup”) and now I’m traumatized.
Dighton, Kansas
photographed 9.5.2024
One Day | One Image 