I have moved a lot in my life. If I was to sit down and write up every single place I have lived over the years I know it would be a garbled mess not to mention I am sure to leave off a few due to lack of concrete memories. But there are a few key places I have lived in my life that have left a lasting impression on me so I wanted to write a little bit about some of them.
First I wantr to talk about is Salina, Kansas. I lived in several towns in Kansas and only one would I claim had more impact on me than Salina, but I’ll get to that one in a bit. Salina is not a big city by any definition but for Kansas it’s one of the bigget communities. For those of us who lived in extremely small towns in rural Kansas, yeah Salina sure felt like a city. Nowhere near as big as Wichita or even Topeka, but big enough for central Kansas I suppose.
If you’ve never been to Salina there’s really nothing special about it. It lookms like your typical suburban type small city. A few shops, mostly national chains and a sorta robust downtown for the size of the city. If I was trying to entice a tourist to visit Salina, I’d surely fail as there’s nothing spectacular or noteworthy to go out of your way to see unless yur goal is to visit small cities in rural Middle America I suppose. Even then there’s probably at least a dozen better places.
I didn’t live in Salina long but I lived in it proper more than once, and in nearby surrounding towns for a good chunk of my childhood, so it was pretty central to my development early on. Looking back, it’s just another boring regtular old nothing special place. But I guess at the time it felt so much more important than it actually is.
Tri Cities, Nebraska
I won’t spend too much time on this. The tri cities refers to Kearney, Hastings and Grand Island. Three mostly similar sized nothing cities not different enough from each other to matter, and frankly nearly indistinguisable from the nothing Salina I just wrote about. I went to middle school in Hasting, University in Kearney and shopped at the Best Buy in Grand Island but other than that, they’re basically the same city. The one I spent the most time in would be Hastings as that’s where my uncle lived and we would visit him frequently. We also lived there on a couple of seperate occasions. Not a particularly memorable place but one I visited often enough to stick in my head I suppose.
Jackpot, Nevada. The gatway to the Nine Hells. Nothing to discuss just a dust bowl in the Nevada dessert with a couple of generic western themed casinos and not much else. I went to high school here and lived off and on more times than I would care to remember.
Twin Falls, Idaho
One of the most special places to me mostly because it’s where I was born. It’s only marginally larger than the four above mentioned nothing cities in Kansas and Nebraska but it’s at least truly spectaculary for touristy stuff. It’s built along side the Snake River Canyon, right by the Twin Falls water fall and the Shoshone Falls water fall. It’s also got some hot springs nearby, rock climbing and a few outdoors type things you can’t find in the flatt ass nothing Great Plains. But it’s still a fairly generic small city with the same national shops you’d find nearly anywhere else. Noth much local flair, to be honest, but it is overrun with Mormons so there is that, for what it’s not worth.
Then there is Miltonvale, Kansas. I have already written several articles and blogs about Miltonvale. All I will say here, not to repeat myself too much, is it was the first town where I had a proper friend group that wasn’t just my sisters and cousins. Nothing at all special, even the school district shut down and there’s not much but remnants of businesses that onces existed but have been forgotten to time. It was where I had my first girlfriend though so that’s something at least.
That’s about it. Aside from that year and a half I lived in Dallas, every other place I lived is rather forgetable. I don’t have to say anything about Dallas for gods sake it’s a major US city, everyone knows about it. I did live inside actually city limits, and not just a suburn or on the outskirts, so there is that I suppose.
Stephanie Bri 