Western Towns and Wacky kids...

So anyway...  

Apparently, the world's largest buffalo wasn't enough of a tourist draw, so they built an entire tiny western town on the same property.  

Cool.

Having arrived first in this tourist mecca, the kids and I wandered through the local mercantile while we waited for Jess to arrive.

Meeting a blog friend for the first time is just plain weird... so many thoughts flit through your head.  

What will they be like?  What will they think of me? 

What if we don't like each other?  What what what... 

And you find yourself trying to imagine how the initial meeting will go,
but there's no way to actually plan it is there?

So I was wandering the mercantile and out the window I saw some tiny familiar faces.  

They were the main cast of characters over at Jess' blog.  And with them was Jess, of course.  

I opened the creaky screen door and timidly asked, "Jess?" 

I don't exactly remember what happened next, it's all a bit of a blur of introductions

and wandering around the over-sized bison 

and maybe some griping about taking pictures in the harsh light of noontime in the summer.

And I remember that my ginormous children were also in a bit of a mood,
not a bad one, just silly.  

They were playing on playground equipment clearly marked "for small children only." 

(Seriously... where's their parent?  Oh... taking pictures of their bad behavior? Hmmm.)

They made themselves comfortable in the saloon (a bit too comfortable maybe) 

and settled down for a game of cut-throat poker. 

(How do they even know how to play that?) 

Which resulted in a few people getting put in jail.  

And while all this was going on, Jess and I got to know each other, to find out who we were and if we like each other as well in "real life" as we did on line.  

This may have been just a bit more important as we had planned to spend the entire day together at her house eating REAL food and not doing laundry. 

(I had recently decided to do laundry during a quick stop in South Dakota.)  

We watched our children play (or rather my children act like crazies while her children looked on warily)

and bonded over the mutually mystifying concept of some guy's use of a pop-up flash with a very expensive and very long lens. 

"Doesn't he know that he'll get a shadow??" 

(I believe this may still give Jess a twitch from time to time.)
  :) 

And then... after a lunch of curly fries and chicken nuggets, we packed the children up and Jess bravely allowed us to follow her back to her home.

Or were we the ones being brave??
 

After driving and driving and driving down a dusty road 

and then turning down yet another dusty road in the middle of farmland

with nothing but corn, sunflowers and sky as far as the eye can see, 

Julia pipes up and asks,

"Hey mom?  Shouldn't one of the rules be 'Never follow a stranger into the middle of nowhere?'" 

Yes, Julia.... that's a good rule, a very good rule... ;)