Adventures down east

The columnist as he was treated to a birthday party.

Courtesy photo

Greetings from the Omaha area. Grannie Annie and I are enjoying a week with our daughter and her husband who live here.

She put together a big surprise birthday party for her old dad yesterday. Great good time with relatives and friends. Hard to believe that it was #87!

I’ve heard people complain about how hard it is to drive in the traffic here in Nebraska’s largest city. I always tickle because I learned city driving in Boston in my Volkswagen Bug and the secret there is to challenge the other drivers and press on. It works in West Coast traffic also. Having the GPS display also helps having that female voice warning of turns coming up and “TURN NOW” just a little early. No fender benders — as of yet.

Last Friday I was privileged to drive to O’Neill to participate in the quarterly Division of Aeronautics Commission meeting. It is where we allocate the aviation fuel tax and aviation sales tax revenue to our state system of airports for upkeep and improvements.

Federal money is also a part of that so there are a lot of rules on how the money is allocated. The system is somewhat like our NDOT who spends the money that is generated by the gas tax that we pay at the pump when we fill our automobile at the filling station.

For this former old farmer, the springtime trip from Omaha to O’Neill and return was a treat. Green everywhere except all the fields that had been worked and prepared for planting. No planters in the fields due to ample recent rains. Yes, all of Nebraska appears to be wet at the moment. One thing about the area that I drove through is the lack of level ground.

These farmers farm up and down the hills which sometimes are really steep. It would be pasture at home but here the soil seems to wash very little so terraces are seldom required.

The area is laid out neatly with up to date well kept farmyards. I’m reminded of the German immigrants that came to our area of southwestern Nebraska.

Still, around O’Neill, one finds signs announcing Irish themed events so possibly it was the people of Ireland that settled the area.

Thankfully our University of Nebraska is not having any of the disruptive anti-Israel disruptions that we have been seeing on TV about every evening.

It looks like graduation will go on as scheduled. Yes there have been a few groups of students (?) standing in support of the pro-Palestinian cause but for the most part peaceful. Thankfully!

The best suggestion that I’ve heard to stop the disruptful demonstrations like at Columbia and UCLA. Arrest the demonstrators, students and non-students alike and let them sit in jail for a couple of day to think about it.

While in stir make them watch videos of the mass murder that Hamas conducted against their Israeli neighbors on October 7th.

Listen to the women screaming while being raped, watch babies getting their heads cut off in front of their parents and grandparents.

Children seeing their parents being killed. All things documented against Israelis by the terrorists that the demonstrators are supposedly supporting. Such barbarism has to stop!

That is the way that I saw it.

Dick Trail