Today was a trek through some unfamiliar territory for me. After our fiasco with Hotels.com yesterday, we overslept and had to scramble to get out by checkout time at 11am. Since our plans were to meet Mike Ranft tomorrow in Albuquerque New Mexico, we decided to drive as much as possible. Our path today needed to take us across Kansas. There isn’t much in Kansas. I-70 is pretty much it, at least from a map’s standpoint.
I will say this, though: while it’s mostly flat and relatively uninhabited by city-folk standards, there are some interesting landscape features as one drives along I-70. We saw the well-known mid-west change in landscape, the brush, the plains. Giant windmills and farmland dotted the landscape. Folks talked to us, not in a hurry, and with a surprisingly attractive and not unpleasant Kansas drawl.
At the sun set in Kansas, we grew near the boarder. Knowing that we’d need to make our way to Albuquerque, I started doing some research on the tablet. Both my tablet and the car’s GPS suggested that we turn off of I-70 near Colby, KS and start our way on state roads. Kansas has two interstates in all of it’s land. One is I-70 which runs due East-to-West, and the other is 35, which runs diagonally into Wichita (with the due notation of a few short beltways and connector interstates). Everything else is a US Highway or a State Road.
So, as we left I-70, we started diagonally downward towards Colorado. And here begun the real adventure. As mentioned, the sun had set before we had even left I-70 for the smaller roads in Kansas. By the time we hit Colorado, the GPS was taking us on a mad dash through tiny roads, some of which were literally residential towns of less than 10 streets in backwoods Colorado. It was entirely pitch-dark, and we were not able to see a single feature of the Colorado landscape. [Edit: that's ok, because tomorrow we'd get a very different but equally frustrating aspect of Colorado's landscape.] It was a little disconcerting, because we had to force the GPS to add “via-points” in order to get gas, and we were never sure if the gas stations would be open due to it being the only feature in a six-road tiny push-pin in the map and it was a Sunday night.
Finally, at 11:30pm Mountain Time, we hit a town in Colorado on I-25: Trinidad. From first glance, it seemed a beautiful little city in the Colorado landscape. I called Hotels.com to get a room, and found that, due to the fact that they were based in Central Time and had to stop booking for the night at midnight, they couldn’t help us book at all. Luckily, we found a Best Western which was fairly inexpensive, and ended up being the nicest room we’ve stayed in so far. It even had a back fenced-in patio where Henrik was able to go outside for a little while. Perfect, and well suited to our needs.
[Edit: Photos from today's journey added below; mouse-over to see what they are, click on them to enlarge:]
So here is a picture in which you can see that we are officially halfway through Kansas, which means that we have officially crossed the crease in the USA Atlas! Now we’re in the Western half of the United States!
Beautiful Kansas sunset. With no cities and virtually no pollution, it does really interesting things to the skyline. Very different from both East- and West-Coast sunsets.
So when Cliff asked me what I wanted for dinner, I made a few suggestions based on restaurants at the exit we had pulled off of to get gas. After telling me that he wanted to eat “a slice of Americana,” he immediately spotted “Taco John’s” which is like an old converted Rax with a menuboard which was likely left over from, well, Rax. So, Taco John’s: A Little Slice of Americana. Yeah.
When we finally found a gas station after crossing into Gebumblebackwoods Colorado, I really had to use the bathroom. In the bathroom was a lovely, er, “Men’s Health Aides” dispenser, and this lovely bathroom deodorizer. The graffiti on it reads “After breathing this product, contact your poison control center.”
