Friday, October 21
Colorado is really wide. And very flat on the eastern side of the state.
Once you get past Denver, there really isn’t much there. Vast, brown fields with not much around. At that point, you’ve got the Rockies behind you and you are headed toward the Great Plains and Kansas. It sure was boring.
The odometer stood at 28,325 when we pushed off from Boulder, and I was ready to get home now. Flat, boring surroundings was incentive to go, go, go.
And so we did.
Hot spots along the way were some more ethanol distilleries, windmills and small oil rigs.
I cheered when we finally crossed over the Kansas border several hours later. And we looked for the World’s Largest Easel in Goodland, Kansas just after the border. But we didn’t see it. Perhaps I was looking for it closer to Route 70 and it was farther off the road, actually inside the town. I don’t know how you can miss an 80-foot-tall easel with Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” on it, but I did.
And I certainly wasn’t going to turn around to go find it. We were headed home! Apparently I’ll have to go back to western Kansas another time to see that.
Auggie and I made a couple of stops during the 325-mile drive we did that day. We needed to play some fetch, have some lunch, stretch our legs, sniff the prairie and keep ourselves interested. The interesting thing was seeing all this prairie in the autumn. When we had traveled east across the Great Plains at the front end of our trip, it was summer and the crops were thriving. It wasn’t so beautiful in late October once the corn had been harvested. Barren is a good word.
We overnighted in the middle of nowhere, at a horrible little campsite in Hill City, Kansas. And I hadn’t even packed my ruby slippers to brighten the place up! We were the only camper on a small tract of land surrounded by grumpy-looking people who lived in trailer homes. It was not our favorite night on the road.
We took a quick evening walk, had dinner and called it an early night. I got two blog posts written and posted - thank you to whosever WiFi I was using. I was suddenly really fixated on driving home to Maryland, so getting an early start the next morning was A-OK with me.
