America

I am always amazed at the stereotyped ways I think about places.  As a six year old I saw the Wizard of Oz and automatically decided that everyone in Kansas lived in a black and white world.  Then my cousins, from Kansas City, came to visit and they were not that dull sort of pasty white I saw on the television.  They looked just like me!

You would think that would have been lesson enough, but not really . . .

I went to Wyoming expecting to see "where the deer and the antelope roam free" and they were in one small isolated strip of mountain roads where the grades were six percent or worse.

I imagined Louisiana as a place where, "my momma done rocked me in my cradle in them old cotton fields back home" only to discover green lawns dripping with live oaks and crepe myrtles among pontoon boats and subdivisions.

I came to Alabama without "my banjo on my knee" and found, not bayous and backwoods houses surrounded by alligators and Spanish moss, but mountain roads and majestic trees. 

I've seen sand dunes in Michigan and Colorado, the old rolling mountains of North Carolina and the rugged Rockies out west. And the one constant is always the breath taking beauty I find when I arrive in a new place for the first time.

From the Mariposa Grove of giant Sequoias to the Everglades of Alligator Alley this country truly is beautiful from, "sea to shining sea."