Small towns like these rarely provide much incentive for the best and brightest of their young people to stick around, and it shows.
And you really would not expect a significant influx of new blood. So, with the best and brightest escaping at the earliest opportunity, and a limited gene pool, a few "leading" families interbreeding generation after generation, is it any wonder that rural communities get a little strange?
I mentioned the odd problem I had with my Canon Powershot after visiting Plainview, and the identical problem with my wife's identical camera. Yesterday I checked her camera again, after throwing mine in the trash, and it worked normally. This is really inexplicable, unless the alien or time-traveler we encountered in Plainview decided to have some gentle fun at our expense! I never want to get anywhere close to Plainview, ever again! Brrrr!
Plainview is creepy. That was the impression my mom and dad got when they drove through the little town years ago, late at night. They needed a place to stay the night and had trouble finding a motel. The cops were not at all helpful and seemed hostile. The town was very dark and very quiet with nothing around showing signs of life but roving bands of teenagers. They eventually stumbled onto a Bates Motel and stayed the night there but even the motel desk clerk was hostile and suspicious and not at all interested in their business. Plainview seems to me to be morbidly inbred and odd. I really don't want anything to do with this strange place. I'd like to warn anyone contemplating Wayland Baptist to go to the campus in Lubbock. Avoid Plainview if you can. That's my advice.
So I really need to finish this photo series and go on to the next. But here is something strange. I took these photos with a Cannon Powershot A 610. When I got home I found that all the pics were 640x480, even though I had the camera set on the best mode! I found that the camera would only produce 640x480 pics, no matter what you set it on. I checked my wife's identical camera and found that it had the same problem! The only thing I can come up with is that the internal date change triggered a self-destruct feature placed there by the manufacturer. Very odd. There was nothing wrong with the memory cards. It's a good thing I didn't pay much for those cameras, but I'm very irritated by this programmed sabotage. What else can it be?
Finishing the July Fourth parade and moving on to other sights in Plainview...
Here are several pics of what used to be a public pool near the park where we watched the parade. It seemed to have been a great facility at one time and why it closed and became a ruin is a mystery. The alien we encountered led us here, but what exactly he wanted to communicate is unclear. He did tell us that it was once a popular place.
