A Passport to Pastoral Fun

I'll say it, even if you won't.

Social media sucks in the summer. 

Come early June and--voila!--gone are the endless snapshots of Junior's graduation and the mind-numbing Farmville requests, replaced by photos uploaded from exotic locales and botched Spanglish posts made from the beach ("Ola from Porta Vallearta! Montezuma hasn't visited yet!!!! LOL!!!!").

omg

The first few weeks of summer, I was utterly overwhelmed by all that digital evidence of everyone else's international intrigue.  At one point, I was starting to feel like a real loser, and succumbed to a new low--posting about poop and colonoscopies.  Whatever it takes, I told myself, as long as I get a little media buzz, too.  As my children pointed out later (unfortunately, a little too late), poop does not a real friend make.

tmi

Had I only held out for another week, I could have joined the "Look at me!  Look at me!" club without all the liquid poop-lah. 

Ask me tonight what I think about the plethora of fancy vacation posts on Facebook and I will tell you that I feel nothing but sad pity for all those Pepto-popping people choking down exotic foods culled from the sea and placed directly onto their quavering tongues. 

Sounding like some knock-off Mr. T, I pity those fools who have bankrupt their savings accounts and messed up their already-screwed-up sleep patterns just to say they've been there, wherever "there" is. 

Yep, I've had myself a mountain-top experience this week, if you consider a 3,000-foot butte in northwest Nebraska a mountain. Something amazing happened Sunday morning when I gathered my brood and drove west.  Over the next 8 hours, we witnessed a Nebraska transformed, a place pocked by sandy canyons, a land daubed with crystalline lakes tucked between grassy hills, a point on the map accented by pines waving their evergreen flags atop the buttes.

Why on earth would people go anywhere else on earth than right here?  Our family trip required nothing but a tankful of gas and a willingness to slow down for the antelope running alongside our car.  Oh, and a $25 Nebraska Parks sticker, to make it all official.  I hope people will stop me, having spied the orange Parks tag on my windshield, and ask me about my adventures. 

If they do, I will tell them--probably in one, long, sputtered sentence that would be very difficult to diagram--that, when you vacation in Nebraska, you can see cowboys and porcupines and bullsnakes that look exactly like rattlers, minus the rattle, and you can drive down a crazy gravel road in the middle of absolutely nowhere and happen upon heaping hills of beautiful rocks, scattered among a herd of cattle that, at one point, consider rushing you but then think better and head across the road to greener pastures and then you can visit the moon at Toadstool where exactly two other people are at the time and eat huge, cheap pancakes at the Fort Rob lodge before heading out to kayak and hike and talk with a rock-shop lady whose son dug up a real dinosaur just a few miles from there and then head home on a highway that feels like a rollercoaster ride, only no one else is on it, unless you count the antelope and porcupine and raccoon and curlew and a tractor or two kicking up dust along the horizon.

Ah, maybe it would just be easier to post a few photos. . . .