Metal-Pretty Prairie TB

Please drop this item in rural OR Premium Member Only caches.  Do not place it in an urban cache or abandon it at a caching event.  Transport the bug in the original plastic bag for as long as the bag lasts; the bag keeps the trackable clean, preserves the tracking number and prevents tangling with other items.  Otherwise, take the travel bug anywhere you wish.  No permission is needed to leave the U.S.

Photos in the travel bug logs are appreciated.  I will be re-post them here, where they can be seen by other cachers.

While I have lived in Texas for nearly 50 years, I was born and grew to an adult in Kansas.  When I tell someone of my origins, they almost always respond in one of two ways:  “I have been there but I don’t remember much about it” or “that 400 mile drive across the state on Interstate 70 is really boring.”  There is more to the state than that.  The wheat grown there feeds the world, and the people are nice.  I watch for items I can convert to travel bugs.  Some some metal beads having a raised letter on the face were encountered and each bead was named for a Kansas town whose name starts with the letter on the face of the bead.  The towns remembered either have a connection to my youth or have an interesting name or history.

Pretty Prairie--the name speaks for itself.  It is a farming community of about 700 people in Reno County, in the south-central part of the state.  Every July the population swells to 8,000 for four-day rodeo on the PRCA circuit.  There is a large Amish and Mennonite presence in that region of Kansas.  I had one friend from high school who moved from there, and another handful of friends from there with whom I went to college.  The high school friend was a good basketball player.  He later moved to California and recorded a song that was not even as successful of Tab Hunter’s “Young Love,” which was a knock-off of the more popular Sonny James’ version.  I had both the latter recordings, on 45s.  If those last two statements do not date me, nothing will.