Somewhere Over the Rainbow
15 Sep 2005

Sept 13, 2005
Greg and I have been trading off driving every 60 miles just like in Australia. Getting the best gas mileage has been kind of a small competition between us. Yesterday I got 62 mpg! That's my BEST yet. I rarely break the 60 mark, but to get 62 was fantastic for me. We decided to install cruise control in the hybrid before we left home. Greg and Ivo installed it as the rest of us just sat back and drank a few beers. The cruise control has totally paid for itself. In the first week following our departure we have passed countless cops with ease, knowing that the cruise has it under control.

Last night we camped in El Dorado State Park in Kansas. We went to sleep early... the air mattress had a slow leak and it kept flattening after only an hour or so. I kept waking Greg up and rolling him off of it so I could refill it to get another hour of sleep. The wind was so strong that the tent was bowed in on one side and the front door was flapping like a flag. Noisy noisy noisy. I was waiting for the Wicked Witch of the West to come flying by. We really were in Kansas. I kept waking up to the sound of a loud semi off in the distance. When our alarm finally went off at 6:45 am, 20 minutes before the sunrise I again heard the sound. When a flash of light caught my eye I peeked out of the tent. The sky was beautifully clear waiting for the sun to peek out on one side and on the other, quite a different story. Dark storm clouds consumed the sky. The lightning show was spectacular. I immediately woke up Greg, who rushed outside with his camera to get lightning shots. Sunrise on one side, storm on the other. I split my time whereas Greg got mostly storm shots.

I soon hurried him off to the car to start packing it before the storm came. We packed up the last bit just as it started to pour. Narrow escape.

Sept 14, 2005
We spent yesterday in Dodge City, KS. This is the city that westerns depict, Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid, all the famous ones... it's pretty cool to see the old/new comparison pictures & imagine the horses at the hitching posts where cars are now parked. The most interesting (and disturbing) thing about Dodge City, and much of this area of Kansas, is the feeding yards. We saw one of the largest "Feeding Yard"s in the world. This is where cattle are shipped in, fed solely on feed for about 2 months until they weighed almost DOUBLE their body weight, then shipped off to the markets. Did I mention there can be up to 60,000 cows in this “yard” at any time period? The TWO cattle yards in this area alone could feed 16 million families for one year on their annual output. The sad thing about this, so much so that I’m considering becoming vegetarian, is that they have no room to exercise, no grass, and it stinks so horribly that you want to pass it by as quickly as you can. Where is the humanity? Or the bovinity?

Today we got the hell out of Dodge and took a detour to see “Iris’ Country Kitchen”. After arriving in Ulysses, just 100 miles out of our way, we discovered that the place we had heard so much about had actually closed down earlier in the year due to bankruptcy. How tragic, I was really looking forward to trying some of the Chicken Fried Steak & the pies! On the way north it started to rain. We took another detour to “Monument Rocks” and found that not only were we the only people on the backroad there, but we were the only people at the rocks too. The black storm started to roll in and we pushed on. Fields of corn & sunflowers passed us by. We found a 15 foot tall statue of Buffalo Bill hunting a Buffalo, then we found a 100 foot tall painting of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. The weather was cool today and we turned off the A/C. I’m pleased to say that this bumped up my highest mpg to 72!!! Can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings.