WESTPHALIA

I got to Paris while there was still enough light to do a little sightseeing, and I was happy about that, because I read about a couple of sights I'd wanted to see. And I drove up on the first pretty quickly: The Evergreen Cemetery. This is one of the largest cemeteries in the country, and the only, I suspect, with a statue of Jesus wearing cowboy boots.

I'd seen pictures of this Jesus, but none of them were very good. You couldn't really see the boots. I can't imagine how anyone had found this statue in the first place, because the cemetery is enormous and pretty overwhelming. I assumed my chances of finding it, especially since I probably only had a half hour of good light, were slim to none. There were no maps or indicators anywhere, so I just started driving through the place randomly. I found it in about a minute and a half. So I took my pictures, which are just as bad as all the other pictures I've seen - it seems that it's just really hard to get a good picture of these things. But I will personally vouch for the fact that this Jesus is indeed wearing cowboy boots.

The next thing I was planning on finding was the replica of the Eiffel Tower that the citizens of Paris had erected in the middle of the 1990s, and then topped off with a big cowboy hat a couple of years later. But the fact was that it had been a long day, and I was ready to stop looking at things.

I knew that most of the hotels were on a loop around the edge of town, but I'd also read about a bed and breakfast near downtown that might have had open rooms. I hadn't committed to it yet, so I didn't have exact directions, and I drove around in the old neighborhoods of Paris for a while trying to track it down. I saw lots of lovely, huge Victorian homes, many with owners who obviously loved them a lot. I didn't see the B&B, though, and then all the sudden I wound up in the town square.

And downtown was hopping! I was surprised that there would be so many people out in downtown Paris at 7:30 p.m. on a Thursday night, but there were. There was obviously something fun going on, so I parked my car hoping I'd find a street festival or a dance or a concert. Instead, I found out everybody was headed into a theater to see an amateur production of Nunsense. I chose to pass on that.

I decided to just head out of downtown, and find a value-priced hotel on the loop. (I stayed at the Best Western. My television didn't work very well, but the water pressure was divine.)

On the way out of town, I got behind something I've never seen before: a big truck of bees. It was an 18-wheeler stacked high with hives, with some sort of netting thrown over it. The big dark things at the top of the truck that you see in the picture are actually big clumps of live bees. It was freaky. I followed the bee truck in to Oklahoma.

It started to sprinkle just outside of Hugo. I didn't stop again - I raced the rain all the way to my parents' house.

The first cowboy movie star of the trip.