Some Views Of Idalou

Idalou, by contrast with Ropes, is a much better looking and more prosperous community. It is not really isolated, and whatever you can't find in Idalou will be nearby in Lubbock. But you could survive in Idalou without a car, if you can walk at least a half-mile. In Ropes, if you can't drive you're going to starve to death.

Somebody bought the building above, in downtown Idalou, and they are working to restore it.

Idalou is bounded by cotton fields, for the most part. Some farmers are growing corn as well.

 

Showing You The Ropes

We'll finish Ropes today. It seems that Ropesville might have seen better days but I don't know when. I guess I could mention that Ropes also has no barber shop? The list of what Ropes does not have is a long one. UPDATE! Conditions in Ropesville have probably improved since we visited. I believe they've got some kind of large convenience story with gas pumps and prepared food now, and there are some housing developments, I believe. At any rate, I'll never visit this town again, although not long ago I drove through it while on the way to Brownfield. I didn't stop in Ropes but I noted that it seemed to have improved. 

 If I lived in Ropes my top priority would be to move away from Ropes, to a town that had, at the very least, a gas station and a supermarket.

That was Ropes and my wife and I truly feel sorry for anyone who has to live there. 

 

Learning The Ropes

Some views of downtown Ropesville:

At the extreme left, above, is the city hall and police station.
 

 The rest of downtown could be considered "historic".

Ropes welcomes you.

Looking for a good place to raise your kids up in? Ropesville might be the ticket. 



 

Ropes Pictures

Or Ropesville by another name...

An awful odor and a lot of flies around this structure. We wondered what that meant-- what do they USE this thing for?

There's the cotton gin in the background. It must be the major economic power in this town. Ropes does have a Post Office, though it looks run down and might even be abandoned, as far as we could tell.

 Poor as this place is, you've got to have your high school football stadium.

 Pathetic. What a waste of money. More Ropesville/Ropes coming up...

A Glimpse Of Ropes

Ropes (Ropesville) has no bank, no supermarket, no place to get groceries of any kind, not very many paved streets, no cemetery (that we could see), no convenience store, no public park, no doctors or clinics that we could find, or a dentist, or a movie theater-- things you take for granted in a city of any size. We couldn't find any provision for trash collection or street repair but surely they must have something along those lines. Ropes is very small and has a few churches and a cotton gin. Couldn't be sure of it but there might be a shade tree mechanic or two. There's a school and a football stadium, of course. We couldn't find a place to buy gas. To find a bank or buy a few groceries or to put gas in your car it's about a twenty mile round trip. You'd better have a car. But some of the tumbledown houses in Ropes don't have vehicles in evidence. Some structures we took to be uninhabited or uninhabitable had window air-conditioners hanging out of holes cut in the wall, and there were plastic toys among the weeds around most of them. No dogs or cats anywhere, and not many people outside, but just about every structure seemed to be in use by someone. Hard to imagine how they survive. We saw one guy in a Mercedes Sedan checking a padlock on a storage building. We saw several big trucks and SUVs. We encountered a lot of flies and a bad stink near what seemed to be a big brick kiln or furnace near the cotton gin. There was a lot of what we interpreted as dire poverty. We found Ropes depressing and disturbing. We would not, ourselves, want to live there under any circumstances whatsoever. But for some it might be paradise...


I'll have to add the pics later because I'm on my wife's computer and her AT&T DSL service is too slow to allow me to upload the pics. I no longer have AT&T for anything-- I've switched my cell service to Consumer Cellular and I'm saving $20 per month. AT&T was once a good company but they aren't anymore. All they want to do is hustle Uverse, and that does not even work as advertised. They treat their employees like dirt. It's time to forget AT&T.