Mini-Traveblogue, a day in Topeka

[dvandom]

Things started getting interesting when I was in Wamego, maybe ten minutes east of Manhattan. I pulled ahead of an ambulance that I'd been more or less following since Manhattan, wanting to be ahead of it once US24 narrowed to one lane each way...ambulances block vision as badly as semis. No sooner had I gotten ahead of it than it turned on its lights and siren, yay timing! So I pulled over and let it past. It got out of sight fairly quickly, and I got back up to speed.

As I was rolling through Belvue, another ambulance suddenly popped up behind me with lights and sirens. I think it was waiting until we hit town since there wasn't really a shoulder to pull onto on the road heading in. Now my interest was really piqued.

Finally, I caught up to the accident. Just west of St. Mary's, there's a little "bridge" where the road goes over a creek. The road west of it has pretty steep drops off on either side, and on the south side a minivan was in someone's yard, a big rippling dent along the passenger side. Couldn't see the driver's side. It looked like it had been heading west and went off the road. Then, on the bridge-let, the guardrail on the eastbound side was crumpled but not totally broken. There was no second vehicle, but the damage to the rail and to the van suggests there was a hit and run and some serious pinballing around. Both ambulances were there, plus a firetruck and a bunch of cops. Several cars were parked along the side of the road, probably witnesses who stuck around to talk to the cops. Gonna have to keep an eye on the newspaper tomorrow (and see if St. Mary's has a local paper website...Topix has an accumulator for St. Mary's news, but nothing new on it since Wednesday).

Anyway, having started taking notes (I pulled into a parking lot in St. Mary's to start the memo file on my PDA), I kept taking notes for the rest of the trip. This was my second trip to Topeka in as many weeks, since last week's was hosed by weather. The goal this time was to hit the stores I missed last week, plus check out the far east side of Topeka as I'd intended to do last week.

When I set out, it was in the mid 40s F with a forecast of not getting a lot warmer or colder during the day, so I wore my winter coat but no fleece underneath (the winter coat isn't as thick as I'd like). It got unexpectedly warm and sunny by the time I got to North Topeka (almost 60° F), so the "buy a new hoodie soon" thought became a "buy a new hoodie NOW" situation. So I got one on sale and wore it for the next three hours.

Well, turned out there wasn't much to see in Northeast Topeka. Farms, Billard Airport (unimpressive, I barely spotted the control tower), and then I overshot Croco Road due to a damaged street sign and went a few miles west on Seward into an area that makes North Topeka look gentrified. I think it's a mainly hispanic neighborhood, pretty economically distressed. Oh, not a Bad Neighborhood as far as I could tell...homes were in decent upkeep and all that. But the few businesses looked tattered and faded, having last seen new paint during the Reagan Administration. No national chains seemed to feel it worth their while to put franchises there, so it was all mom & pop stuff.

After turning around and heading back in the right direction, I finally got to 29th and Croco, the supposed outpost of commercialdom on the east side, and Thunderbird Square is pretty sad. There's a second strip mall just east of the intersection on 29th, but it wasn't anything special. I'm glad I didn't try to make it out here last week in the snow!

Lake Shawnee (a reservoir lake) was nice, though, and driving down 29th in front of the dam was moderately impressive. It's a big earthen dam maybe four or five stories tall at the middle, with a spillway at the northwest corner that creates a little creek that goes under a small ornamental bridge.

Getting back into places I'd been before, I decided to take a left turn and go south on California Avenue and see if there was anything interesting. It was just residential stuff (upper middle class) and a park. So I headed back to 29th so I could hit a used book store there. And so ended the sightseeing portion of the trip, as I re-entered familiar territory for the rest of the day.

This was the second week in a row that I've stepped out of the south side Wal-Mart to find a radical weather shift. At least this time it was just "the Sun went away and the temp dropped fifteen degrees" instead of lat week's DethSno. Then the temperature dropped another fifteen degrees over the next half hour.

You know, if the first three letters in your "CUSTARD PIES" neon sign are burnt out, you probably shouldn't turn it on.

All in all, it was nice to extend my "on the ground" knowledge of Topeka a bit, even if I didn't find much worth returning to. And on the shopping side, it was a worthwhile trip as well, even if I got no Transformers.

Comments

[sweh.livejournal.com]

TARD PIES?

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

Yep.