24th – 29th June 2019
Kansas was the state that we had most anticipation about visiting but when people heard that it was on our route, they asked ‘why ?’ I can understand that reaction. At first glance, it doesn’t have much to offer the tourist. It is pretty monotonous terrain, with not much more than a few low undulations to break up the horizon. It has no major national parks or well known sites of historical interest. It is freaking hot and humid in summer and sits in the middle of the infamous ‘tornado alley’. Of course Dorothy knew all about that. For us, Kansas was a chance to leave the classic tourist routes and get back to the sort of road tripping that we enjoy most. Seeing the small towns, the quirky attractions along the way and witnessing a bit of ‘normal’ USA, whatever that may look like. Sometimes it looks vast, impressive and wonder-some. Sometimes it looks like a Walmart car park or a dilapidated home with junk piled up in the garden. US 50 continued as our guide and we left Colorado and rolled on into Kansas, the state with the strap line ‘Kansas, as big as you think’. (Although it is only the 13th biggest state by area.)
Kansas sits in the Central Time Zone, mostly. Except for four of its 105 counties on its western border, which remain in Mountain Time Zone with its neighbour, Colorado. How nuts is that? And who decided that was a good idea? It must be so confusing for people who go to work or school in the next county. In fact it seems about 13 states have time zone borders that don’t align with state borders. At least they all observe daylight savings time… oh wait, except for Arizona. Get your act together USA! And while you’re at it, can you please go metric. It really is about time you were with the rest of the world on this…oh wait, Britain is still a little bit imperial… Both of you then.
Where was I?
Kansas…
Home of the world’s largest hairball. We had to stop in Garden City to see this. It is housed in a small museum in a park, next to one of the most impressive municipal swimming pools I have ever seen. It is so large that you can windsurf on it (if you are good at turning, I imagine). The hairball was removed from the stomach of a steer in a nearby abattoir in 1993, and at the time was 55lbs. (24.9 kg). Now it is lighter as it has dried out. We toured the whole museum looking for this exciting thing, imagining that it wound be artfully displayed in its own cabinet, but couldn’t see it. Just as we were about to ask the ‘lady at the desk’ if it had been removed, we saw it. It was just plonked on the desktop next to her, balanced in a in a brass pot. You could touch, but not pick it up. It felt like velvet and was about the size of a basket ball.
We were underwhelmed, but I think our expectations had been artificially elevated. We rolled on.
Next destination? Dodge City. There really was only one reason to go to Dodge City, (well two, if you count needing to stop somewhere for the night,) and that was to…
“…get the hell out of Dodge…”
Dodge was a wild west town, an important hub for travel, trains and trade in the mid-late 1800s. Cows were the main commodity and this attracted gunslinging cowboys to the town. At the end of a long day’s work of doing cow stuff, the bars, gambling halls and brothels provided other recreational activities. The town was a booming frontier town until various quarantine laws moved the cow business further west in the later years of the 19th C. It was immortalised in the long-running TV series ‘Gunsmoke’ which spawned the now well known phrase. Our campsite was even called ‘Gunsmoke’ and greeted us with an archway adorned with a large ply-wood smoking revolver. Welcome!
After a month of relentless rain, summer has finally arrived to this part of the world with a vengeance. The daytime temperatures are now consistently above 90F/32C and this really affects daily life. It is now too hot to do anything physical outside, so the exercise levels have dwindled for the time being, and the AC unit in Tin Can is getting nearly constant daytime use. It is a bit too noisy to run at night. It is quite sapping and any opportunity to swim is taken.
Having ‘got out of Dodge’ we had a great drive, continuing along the mostly dead straight US 50 across the Kansas plains. There were huge wind farms with hundreds of turbines, miles and miles of maize and wheat fields and here the scattered nodding donkeys are pumping irrigation water rather than oil. The small towns along our way were mostly based around the huge grain silos of a farm which were built right up to the rail tracks to allow easy loading of grain onto the trains. The road brought us to a town called Hutchinson, the location for our next overnight stop. It is known for two main things: Strataca and The Cosomosphere.
Strataca is a salt museum, built in a disused salt mine, 200 m/600ft underground. The worlds largest deposit of rock salt was discovered under this area and mining began in the 1920s. The mine covers 980 acres in total and now open to the public as a museum, not only for the story of salt mining, but also as a climate controlled depository for old cellulose film and historical film costumes. We were not here for Strataca.
The Cosmosphere was the drawcard for our stop here. It is an amazing, world class space museum and scientific educational facility, in the middle of blimmin’ Kansas. It started in the 1960s as the small hobby project of one woman, Patty Carey, who had a passion for space and set up a small observatory in a disused chicken shed on the Kansas State Fairgrounds. One thing led to another and in its present incarnation it now houses the largest collection of Russian space hardware anywhere outside of Moscow, and had a pretty impressive collection of US stuff too. This included the actual, fully restored space capsule of Apollo 13 “Houston, we have a problem..”‘ fame, and a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird Mach 3 capable spy jet filling the lobby.
It also runs camps for adults here where you can do mock astronaut training. Something to think of when you can’t decide what to get your loved one for Christmas…We killed half a day here, and it was very impressive. This was the 3rd space themed museum of our travels. It was also air-conditioned, which was a big plus.
Post-Cosmosphere, our journey continued a short distance through neat and tidy Mennonite country to another short, one night stop in a small and slightly shabby RV park in a smudge on the map called Hesston. The next day saw us heading to the Tall Grass Prarie, a National Preserve, rather than a National Park. This is a new model for National Parks where the land remains in private ownership but is managed by the National Park Service. Tall grass praries used to cover about 400,000 square miles of the Great Plains, with barely 4% remaining, mainly here, in the Flint Hills of Kansas. They have a bison herd here, allegedly. We arrived 10 minutes too late to catch the tour bus through the park, and private vehicles were not permitted, so what did we do in the 90F plus heat? Yup. Go for a walk. After about 3.5 of shadeless miles walked, 2 L of water drunk and only two distant bison seen through binoculars we made it back to the visitors centre alive. Mad dogs and Englishmen….
Having anticipated the ongoing heat we had booked our next two nights at Eisenhower State Park which is on another reservoir. We could swim and keep cool…or that was the plan. The park was great, but unfortunately all the excess rain of the previous month had caused a lot of flooding and the reservoir levels had risen dramatically. This had swamped half the campsites, submerged some of the park roads and, horror of horrors, obliterated the nearby swimming beach. There was another swimming beach on another smaller lake about 3 miles away and as the temperature peaked, we decided to cycle there to cool down ( a slight oxymoron…) Luckily I checked for directions at the park office before we set off and were told that the other lake had closed for swimming that morning due to high e.coli levels. Good news- we discovered this prior to hot 6 mile round trip cycle. Bad news- no swimming…or was there???!! It transpires that if you ignore ‘road closed’ signs, road submerged by an overfull reservoir makes for a perfectly acceptable swim spot for overheated humans on a hot Kansan day. The inquisitive fish were slightly disconcerting though.
We met one of our nearby co-campers during the day, a chap who was setting up his trailer by himself, with his wife to arrive later when she had finished work. He needed a bit of help lifting something, so Nick obliged and then we got chatting. He was lovely and interesting guy, a Grateful Dead super-fan with a penchant for tie dye t-shirts and band-themed wall hangings. He also had an unparalleled ability to continually talk without drawing breath. We joined them both for a drink later that evening and he generously shared his favourite bourbon with us whilst maintaining constant, relentless, high volume story telling. We finally extracted ourselves at midnight, exhausted, without really having got a word in. His wife was surprisingly sane despite it all.
The next morning we moved on and towards Missouri. Kansas had been very hot but thankfully tornado-free. There are some things we don’t need to experience…
Good writers have come out of Kansas… đŸ™‚