This will be a short entry today and very short on photos. We left Denver at 6:35 and 66 degrees. We had a lot of miles to cover today, and had been warned that traffic in Denver would be bad, so we left early. And even at that early hour, we got held up for about half an hour just getting out of town. But we finally got to the highway and pointed the car east.

Now, I know that Kansas, as part of the heartland of America, feeds us (and a lot of other countries in the world) and the people here are very nice (well, most of them, with the exception of the AO who would not let us merge into traffic…he needs a courtesy lesson from my friends in Arkansas), but gosh, I have to say it…Kansas is a boring state to drive across. All there is to see is farmland. We saw a lot of fields where the crops had been harvested and were waiting for a second planting, fields that were freshly tilled and planted, fields where the crops were thriving, and fields where acres of corn was yellow and dried up, presumably from a lack of rain. You can add the occasional farmhouse with red barn and silver silo and you can add the occasional ranch with cows grazing and you can add the occasional oil well, some with hammers pounding dirt and others as motionless as a rock. And of course there is the required well windmills and the water towers. But it was still over 550 miles of flat farmland, and offered nothing interesting to the tourist. The most interesting thing we saw today was a crop duster flying over a mustard field. Those guys have nerves of steel. I still don't know how he (she) missed the power lines at the end of the field. But I have to tell you, it looks like a boatload of fun!

We did follow the train tracks again today. We could not see them most of the time, or the trains that ride on them, but it was easy to tell where they were because of the location of the many grain elevators and banks of cement containers with the often familiar peeling yellow paint. Each site probably had two dozen of these tall round cylinder-shaped silos, all connected together in two long rows of a dozen each.  

Oh, and did I mention the wind farms. We saw several of those, with hundreds of wind turbines, most of which were gently turning with the breeze in their now familiar dance.

Before checking into our hotel, we took a ride into the city to see the capitol building, as we often do. This one was very nice, although the state office buildings on this capitol complex looked a bit shabby. They need a power wash or a paint job, not sure which.

This trip is winding down. And I am looking forward to sleeping in my own bed for a change. Two more nights on the road and we will be relaxing this weekend at the beach.