We're Not In Kansas Anymore

STATES VISITED: Missouri /Kansas / Colorado

Today was our biggest mileage push, barreling across the whole of Kansas and a goodly portion of Colorado – over 600 miles in one day. We figured there were fewer attractions to see in Kansas, so we might as well just drive like a batmobile out of hell.

Naturally, once we got going, we discovered that I-70 through Kansas offers non-stop tourist action. The Legendary Dorothy House, in Liberal KS! The Steinberg Natural History Museum in Hays KS! The hometown of Wild West sharpshooter Annie Oakley in (you guessed it) Oakley KS! The world’s largest prairie dog town in Grainfield KS! The Prairie Museum in Colby KS! And, only a hundred miles or so off the road, Castle Rock, the Pioneer Museum (in Nebraska, actually, but so long as you’re in the area), and the world-famous Rock City in Minneapolis, KS, which used to be advertised in huge yellow letters on the roofs of barns all over the Midwest (those that weren’t already advertising Mammoth Cave or Mail Pouch Tobacco). Alas, we had no time for any of it.

On the other hand, the landscape was worth the whole trip. First, between Manhattan and Salina, we rolled through the Flint Hills, a luminous rolling panorama of rounded hilltops and wooded hollows and outcrops of gray stone, in spots almost reminiscent of Ireland. The soil here is too thin and rocky for much agriculture, so a fair bit remains of the original tallgrass prairie that used to blanket this part of the world. The grass grows taller here because eastern Kansas isn’t as dry as western Kansas, and it’s a rich mix of blue stem and other grasses sprinkled with wildflowers. It was still too early in the season for the really tall growth – five or six feet high – but beautiful nonetheless.

We stopped for lunch at a Dairy Queen in Abilene, home of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Not surprisingly, after yesterday’s Truman marathon, the kids refused to visit the Eisenhower site. Oh, well, another opportunity squandered.

By the way, notice that yellow emblem on the road signs. It’s supposed to be a sunflower – Kansas is known as the Sunflower State. After the beehive on Utah road signs, this is now my next favorite state highway emblem.

The terrain became much flatter west of Salina. The only trees we could see were planted in a dense cluster around the farmhouses – otherwise it’s just a horizon-wide sweep of high plains. Crops stretched out on either hand – first soybeans on the right and wheat on the left, then changing to wheat on the left and soybeans on the right, the soybeans sparkling in intense green, the wheat a plush carpet of dry gold.

There wasn’t as much corn as I had expected, though -- so much for “I’m as corny as Kansas in August.” Maybe it’s just too dry for corn. Wherever we saw corn, I also noticed these spidery steel irrigation contraptions.

Houses are few and far between out here. Every once in a while, you'll see something mirage-like shimmering on the horizon that looks like a cluster of condo towers, but it turns out to be a huge complex of silos and grain elevators. It made me think of the scene in the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy and her friends see the Emerald City towering in the distance -- I wonder if L. Frank Baum had this in mind?

Another thing I noticed, agriculture-wise -- instead of those spotted herds of dairy cows like we have back east, the cows here were mostly these brawny black cattle. Black Angus? Some kind of beef cattle, for sure. I suppose this is the part of their lives where they get to frolic free before they get shipped off to some hellhole of a feedlot. (See, I've been reading my Michael Pollan.)

Given the wide open spaces, I guess it’s not surprising that we’d roll through a few miles of land that have been converted to a new high-tech wind farm.

If you look close, down to the right you’ll see an old-fashioned prairie windmill, like something out of Shane or High Plains Drifter, dwarfed by those gleaming steel blades of the new giants. (Props to Hugh for getting this all in one shot.)

Past the wind farm, we also saw a few farms with a number of little oil wells pumping away amidst the soybeans. The heads of these pumps remind me of the cartoon crows Heckle and Jekyll, dipping their beaks rhythmically up and down.

At long last we crossed the line into a new time zone – the evocatively named Mountain Time – and soon after crossed the border into Colorado. We thought we'd see mountains right away -- HA! No, just more high plains, though it did get a little more hilly, with tufts of silvery sagebrush cropping up in the grassy margins along the road.

And hey -- guess what the speed limit is here? TAKE THAT YOU CONNECTICUT WIMPS!! Needless to say, everybody still drives at 10 miles over the speed limit.

Then the real drama of the drive began -- we drove right into a violent thunderstorm. We could spot it several miles ahead across the plains -- really dramatic. It lasted for about 20 intense minutes, then we could see the blue skies ahead, and we got our first glimpse of the Rockies in the distance. (You can't see it in these pictures, though.) Here's the sequence:

Traffic in Denver was abysmal -- there had been a six-car pile-up on I-70 east of downtown, and we got caught in the standstill traffic. By the time we pulled into the Grand Hyatt, we were thoroughly exhausted from our long day's journey into night. Which meant just one thing -- room service dinner!! YAY!!!!!