The Road to Change 1/10: Yes We Kansas

We spent all day yesterday driving, without too much to report. Kansas is long, not entirely flat, but flat enough to be dull. Denver to Kansas City is about 600 miles, and we lost an hour on the way, so it took us until nightfall to cross the state. Leaving Colorado, the mountains were visible in the rear view mirror for nearly 100 miles, and before we left the state we crossed through Deer Trail, which boasted that it was the home of the world's first rodeo. Entering Kansas, we passed through the the border town of Kanorado (clever), Colby, Hays, Salina, and Abeliene, and found them not to be noticeably different from each other. Good thing we had an interesting audio book to listen to.



The roadside is the Kansan's message board to the rest of the country. Hastily built signs trumpet the World's largest prairie dog, advertise fertilizer, and assure us Jesus is real. And in Kansas, he is; the only structure as prominent on the vacant horizon as grain silos are church steeples. We passed a field of wind turbines in central Kansas, and later, a truck delivering a blade to one of the broken ones. While Kansas may not have the most attractive topography, it is also the home state of Stanley Ann Dunham, mother of Barack Obama.