Sunday, July 19, 2009
34: We're Not in Kansas Anymore
| Stoker's Log Day Thirty Four |
 |
| 7/19/09 |
| From Garden City, KS |
| To Lamar, CO |
| 113.7 miles |
| 11.3 avg mph |
The best motivation for riding more than 100 miles in one day? Finally getting out of Kansas.
We started before sunrise, sharing the road with what we're pretty sure was a coyote. We spent a few minutes at a truck stop to watch the sun crest the horizon, pose with a sunflower mural (since we're having such difficulty finding real ones), and chuckle knowingly at the fact that there were tourism brochures for every region of Kansas except for the Southeast.
After miles and miles and miles and miles of nothing much (you know the drill), we finally reached a tourist attraction: the famous Sante Fe trail ruts. The Sante Fe Trail was like the Oregon trail, except that the settlers following it either ended up in New Mexico or died of dysentary without a computer game to memorialize them. And here we were, standing near original ruts made by their wagons! Woohoo!
Wait a minute, you may ask, your biggest "tourist attraction" of the day consisted of a rusty fence and a footpath leading to barely visible depressions in some hills? Yes, yes indeed. Once again, welcome to Kansas.
The ruts did give us a chance to think about the amazing boldness and resiliency of those original settlers. We at least know that eventually these lonely, wide open spaces will be replaced by the established comforts of civilization, but the earliest settlers were headed off into the dangerous unknown to start their lives and their towns from scratch. What must they have thought, seeing these expanses for the first time?
If their experience was anything like ours today, they may have thought that the plagues of Pharoah's Egypt were about to rain down on them, starting with the locusts. Ok, maybe the insects were just supersized cicadas or grasshoppers, which is admittedly what they looked like individually:
But I will always think of them as locusts, a plague by the thousands. They emerged in droves from the plants lining the road, coating the shoulder with their milling, mating, leaping bodies. In swift and impossibly high jumps they moved back and forth from field to road, and it was hard not to scream every time one landed on us. The unlucky or uncoordinated found their leaps and their lives cut short by the front tire, which left a trail of smashed and decapitated bodies behind it. Their unsettling infestation lasted for hours and we started to yearn for the uneventful boredom of Kansas that we knew before.
We were thrilled to finally encounter other people: a couple from Oklahoma had stopped their car by the Mountain Time sign and were kind enough to take our photo in front of it. Crossing a time zone line doesn't actually gain us an extra hour, since we're governed by the sun rather than the clock, but progress markers are always welcome.
Farther down the road, several wall murals and a sort of Abe Lincoln cowboy welcomed us to the town of Syracuse.
It was home to what locals told us was "the slowest restaurant in Kansas." Of course they didn't tell us that until after we had sat down, ordered lunch, and waited a very long time for it to appear.
After the long delay we were eager to get back on the road, especially since we were only 15 miles from the border. We started an enthusiastic countdown, cheering and taking a picture at every mile marker. (I didn't bother to post them since a little green number in front of the same boring brush isn't very photogenic). The last interesting things we saw in Kansas were a telephone pole replacement project and a group of curious horses that ran up to their fence to see us.
I was happy to see that four-legged Kansans were as friendly as two-legged ones, but I was even happier to see this sign:
The friendly people of Kansas might be enough to convince me to "Come Again," but it will never, ever, ever be by bicycle.
A few feet up the road was a "Welcome to Colorful Colorado" sign, which we couldn't resist pairing with a sign of our own:
Unfortunately, the world didn't miraculously get better on the other side of the state line, in fact if anything it got worse. Our surroundings still looked like Kansas, but the people weren't as nice, in fact the first ones we met -- two convenience store employees -- were downright bitchy. I don't think I'll be able to handle it if Colorado makes me miss Kansas.
We were happy to roll into Lamar, our destination for the day, especially since it was still light out and we could get under cover before this intimidating cloud started to unleash any rain:
We pulled into a rest area so that Kyle could research hotels while I took photos of a statue and a sample windmill part.
And then we discovered that we had a flat tire, again. It was caused by a metal staple of uncertain origins, again.
Flat tires are inevitable, but having three in as many days is annoyingly above average. When the tire was ready to go again, we rode into town to check out our motel options. Along with seeing another Turkey Hill symbol, this one on a Loaf 'N Jug, we spotted the Holiday Motel, which looked nice enough and advertised "clean rooms" for $45. A quick call to my mom confirmed that online reviews were mostly good, so we inquired about getting a room. The owner personally walked us to the room to let us see how clean it was before we paid, which was pretty impressive. According to the newspaper article in the office, he's a community leader who buys rundown local properties, revamps and revitalizes them, and eventually sells them to other local business people. He's improving the town a few buildings at a time, and the Holiday Motel is one of them. Colorado is looking better already.
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| posted at: 01:22 |
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