Day Six: Emporia, KS to Garden City, KS: 250 miles

Another short drive but long day. We left Emporia at about 8:30 after a meager motel breakfast. They did have a Belgian Waffle maker but the "butter" came out of a plastic bottle that dispensed a yellowish slime and the "syrup" looked like motor oil. Ate it anyway.

Only a few miles out of town we turned off to visit The Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, an 11,000 acre reservation in the Flint Hills area of Kansas, established by Congress in 1996 to preserve and restore the area, as much as possible, to its original ecosystem. The hope is to get much of the prairie grasslands to return to their state before the white western migration and settlement brought major changes to the ecosystem. There's a certain irony in the fact that the Preserve is built around a 19th Century farmstead that until recently had been the principal agent of change to that same ecosystem. The farm buildings are being restored for tourists, and are handsome and imposing, built of limestone on a limestone hill. 


The project is very much under development. A new Visitors' Center was just completed, and the attractions for the public are self-guided tours of the farm buildings and a bus tour of some of the acreage, which we did not say to experience. There is said to be a herd of bison as well as a few head of cattle. 


This is a nice place already, and may someday be a wonderful spot to visit, but so far the most impressive thing about it is the excellent video shown in the Visitors' center.


We drove on through mile after mile of flat flat flat Kansas. We stopped for gas in the little crossroads of Galva, where we also found a large antique emporium. Joy bought a primitive tin goat made in Mexico.


Just outside Dodge City a huge wind farm is under construction. There must be several hundred machines already in place, and many more partially assembled. When we arrived at Garden City we passed the pieces of many others in a large staging area by a railroad siding.  Kansas has discovered wind in a big way. 


And why not? Kansas is flat as a pancake and goes on forever, and the wind always blows (sometimes too hard, as Dorothy and Toto discovered, as did Emporia which was also hit by a tornado a few years ago).

Kansas, by Joy's iPhone

Several friends warned us about driving across Kansas: boring, featureless, and flat, flat, flat. We loved it. For one thing, we finally spent the day off the Interstates. We could see and stop in the small towns that the superhighways bypassed, and we could see for miles across the wide open spaces, where the land went on forever to a distant horizon. It was almost like being at sea. Even this old sailor thought so. Here and there plumes of smoke showed where farmers were burning over their fields to prepare for another crop. Almost everywhere busy little gasoline or diesel-powered engines were powering pump-jacks, bobbing up and down like grasshoppers as they brought up irrigation water from the limestone below. And at one point we came upon a field of natural gas wells. They looked new. I hope they didn't involve the dreaded fracking.

Now we are ensconced in a comfortable hotel room and about to think about going out to find dinner. We have a king sized bed, a microwave and a refrigerator, and a huge flat-screen TV. There's a nice view of the Kansas countryside (over the roof of a Staples store), and the air conditioning works fine. We have learned to request a handicapped bathroom, not only because it's nice to have grab rails, but many years and many motels ago we learned that the people who design hotels and motels think it's important to make the sinks and toilets convenient for little children; adults have to bend double to use the sinks, and to squat only inches above the floor to use the toilets. Handicap-accessible bathrooms are built for grownups.


Tomorrow: Colorado!