No place like Om....aha

Wow, today was a really full day! We were up bright and early for our first interview of the trip, with Omaha resident and artist extraordinaire Jun Kaneko, with a lot of help from his wife, Ree.

We started by meeting the two of them for breakfast at Dixie Quicks, an AWESOME diner with delicious breakfast. It was just recently featured on "Diners, Drive-Ins and Drives" on the Food Network. It totally deserved the praise. I had like the best scrambled eggs, ever. Justin agrees.

From there we headed over to check out Jun and Ree's awesome warehouses. Jun specializes in very large pieces of ceramic art, among a lot of other things, which I will get to momentarily. FIRST, to show how awesome, how to make a giant ceramic work of art:

1) Gather together around 7 different types of clay from all over the United States and mix to form your own special blend of clay.


2) Place concentric circles of clay to form a head, or stonehenge-esque monolith (called "dangos"), and shape to taste. Should be approximately 5-11 feet tall:


3) Fire clay for a session of 11 days in your custom built 2100 degrees Fahrenheit kiln.

4)Glaze head for color, fire the dango or head in the kiln again!


5) Send out installation to well-reputed art gallery around the world!

So anyhow, this was just one of many, many things that Jun Kaneko does in the art world. He does installation tiles in places all over the country, even helping with art in the Big Dig in Boston. He's working on his second opera, having just finished being art director in Madame Butterfly. He's an incredible engineer. He's a painter. A glass artist. Some of his projects take 5-10 years to complete. He and his wife founded an artist's colony in Omaha, paying out of pocket for the first few years. He moved here from Japan when he was in his 20s, having dropped out of school and speaking no English. 45 years later, he's an established, well connected artists who is a giant in his specialty. He's an amazing guy.

If you're still interested in more, you'll have to watch the interview!

Anyhow, then we came back and went to the zoo all afternoon. Hijinx ensued:

It was great fun. There were lots of gorillas. We faced up to our worst nightmare, who we're sure we'll be seeing in Yellowstone, the grizzly bear. We're now terrified.

Then we came back, I cooked Indian food for Caroline's family, and we're tired now and going to bed because we have to be up at 5 AM to get to Wall Drug in South Dakota tomorrow afternoon for our second interview. Tomorrow's one of our longest driving days.

Blogging for the next few days will probably be kind of spotty since we're not going to really have access to Internet until Seattle. We shall see. So, leave comments, give us a call, we'll talk to you all soon!