Over one week of junctions

I began my day in Aurora 5,471 feet above sea level and I'm now ending it in Grand Junction 4,597 feet above sea level. On net I lost about 900 feet. This does not quite tell the whole story. The whole story requires you to know that in between these two cities I passed through Alma, a town of less than two hundred people which is 10,578 feet above sea level. Yes, kids, I crossed the Continental Divide today. Don't think I didn't notice!

Unfortunately, prose is unable to convey the impossibility of the peaks and canyons of the Colorado Rockies to anyone who hasn't been there. Pictures are only slightly better. Lost in clouds though they were on this overcast day, the Rockies captured my eyes whenever I could spare them a glance as I navigated the winding roads. Poor Blackbird couldn't figure out where all the air went and had trouble maintaining her speed on the hills. She'll be happier in California. I don't have many stories from today, as rain limited my outdoor activities and the Rockies don't have a lot of indoor ones, but I do have pictures dating back to Paducah...

My room in Paducah, the first hotel room of the journey. Kazuko reclines on the bed at right. This seems like a really long time ago. I don't have any good pictures of the city.

Tunnel Hill in south Illinois. Longer and mistier than it looks. I also have a picture taken from inside the tunnel; all you can see is mist and some light at the other end.

Independence Temple's spire. The temple is the site of Jesus's Second Coming according to the Mormons. They may not believe in evolution, but I guess they believe in architecture. Magnificent.

A rose from the garden across from Jacob's flat in Kansas City. Jacob taught me how to use my camera's close-focus feature. It's the button that looks like a flower, appropriately enough.

A very relaxed raccoon at the zoo in Oakley, Kansas. He probably wanted to be asleep, but tourists like me kept interrupting him.

This prairie dog, on the other hand, was bright and alert, as were his hundreds of cousins swarming the zoo!

Wiley's mother tends her lake garden in Aurora, minutes after being terrified by a snake. The native snakes are apparently eating her fish. It's a dilemma.

We close with three views of the Rocky Mountains.

From Panorama Point on the Denver side.

From Colorado Route 9 in the midst of the Continental Divide.

From Grand Junction on the west side, where the mountains have given way to mesas and the West proper has begun.

I have plenty more photos, but these tell the story as well as any ten photos can. Time will tell what I photograph tomorrow on my Sunday pilgrimage to Salt Lake City!

I don't think I'm in Kansas anymore

This post comes to you from Aurora, Colorado, just outside Denver. My hostesses this evening are my college friend Wiley and her mother, who -- like all my hosts so far without exception -- have been wonderful to me and ready to help in any way they can. In fact, I'm going to stay with them tomorrow night as well. This traveling has left me breathless! I need a one-day "weekend" when I don't have to drive five hours and can just recover from my adventures so far, and tomorrow is it. I expect I'll still be blogging, though.

Today started way back in Hays. I ate a continental breakfast of oatmeal and then set out for Fort Hays to see if I could uncover the reason a town of 20,000 grew up in rural Kansas so far from a large city. My instinct was borne out on this one! It turns out the town grew up around the fort, as the wives and children of the officers and enlisted men tried to carve lives for themselves out of what was then (in the barely postbellum United States) the frontier. The fort in turn was established as a staging area to protect the railroads from Indian raids. It was named after General Alexander Hays, a veteran of the Battle of Gettysburg recently dead at the Civil War's Battle of the Wilderness. The tour of the fort was itself interesting -- it was much, much better to be an officer than an enlisted man, by the way -- but the reason it will stick in my memory was that a very old stranger from the Wichita area who I hadn't even spoken to went ahead and paid my $3 admission without so much as asking first. We chatted during the tour. He's a pleasant guy who seemed like he would really rather be sitting in an armchair than taking a walking tour, but he was in good humor. He left a big stack of printed cards under my windshield wiper evangelizing the Gospel of Matthew -- a stack that I've duly put in the souvenir bin to remind me of him and the fort.

In between Hays and Aurora I was intrigued by roadway signs advertising the "world's largest prairie dog" and various other prairie animals. On their cue I pulled over in a tiny town that turned out to be Oakley, Kansas. The zoo there was full of native fauna -- coyotes, foxes, buffalo, rattlesnakes -- and the kicker was that it was built atop a live prairie dog town. The whole grounds were studded with holes that prairie dogs darted in and out of constantly. They are adorable creatures. (The "world's largest" is a six-foot plastic molding of a prairie dog in the back of the zoo.) I was a little worried about whether the animals were well cared for in this fairly primitive roadside facility, but I didn't let it stop me from enjoying my first sight of many of these animals. Afterward I went across the street and lunched at a surprisingly yummy buffet before getting back on the road.

I'm not ready to write about Aurora yet, though there's plenty to say! I'm tired and need to go to bed. What I can say is that one's first sight of the Rocky Mountains as one approaches over the eastern Colorado hills -- when you first become sure that what you're seeing are snow-capped peaks and not low-hanging clouds -- is magical and nearly traffic-stopping. This first sight was another milestone on the journey, one more reminder that I'm far from home with no way of getting back but to drive myself and with every intention of venturing further still!

Purple Hays

The skies are indeed purple over Hays, Kansas, a city of 20,000 in western Kansas. The landscape is sort of purple, too, and my mood is purple to top it off.

Today's my birthday, and it got off to a great start with a gourmet breakfast prepared by Jacob, then a lunch of a ground beef popover and a chocolate "Matterhorn" (a mountain-shaped chocolate baked atop a cookie and served with sweet cream) at Andre's Patisserie. I reluctantly bid him goodbye in the afternoon, then drove four and a half hours to Hays without stopping except to refill Blackbird's tank and empty my own. (Rule of traveling I've discovered: never pass up the opportunity to take a leak.)

I took the interstate after all, having been assured by Jacob that there is equally little worthwhile to see on any route through Kansas. I don't agree with his assessment that it's boring, but it's certainly rural, and tourist attractions are few and far between. The land's green and brown spaces are amazing. The high point of the drive, however, was certainly the expedition past a massive wind farm. There must have been hundreds of individual mills gyrating in the breeze. The three polished, rotating blades of each turbine looked so sleek and modern, like something out of a TV commercial for either renewable energy or Mercedes-Benz. If they had no purpose at all, their beauty would make them a landmark and a tourist attraction. It's odd that they're not viewed as one, and there are no roads leading from I-70 to within the churn of the wind farm.

The four and a half hour drive felt longer than it was, and I arrived in Hays feeling drained. Here I made an unpleasant discovery: my cell phone does not have any reception here. Investigating online, I made an even more unpleasant discovery: AT&T does not cover western Kansas at all, and most of the western United States in general is covered only through AT&T's presumably less reliable "partners" or is completely uncovered. Virtually all of Nevada, for example, is an AT&T dead zone. This knowledge scares me. If I break down on the highway in a dead zone I won't be able to call AAA, and God knows I have no idea how to fix anything on my own. Fortunately, I've been able to make contact with Wiley, my host for tomorrow, through Gmail, and she's expecting me in the early evening. But I need to think about backup plans for communication, or else make sure I stick to paths that get reception.

Hays itself feels oddly tense. The people have a look on their faces like they're besieged. Maybe it's the weather, which NPR says may reach 100 degrees tomorrow, or maybe it's my imagination, me projecting my anxiety onto the strangers around me. I ate dinner at Montana Mike's Steakhouse, which served a passable ribeye. I've been trying to avoid soda this trip, but I couldn't pass up the most unique thing on the menu, Sierra Mist with pear flavoring. Sweet! The pear taste was overpowering and delicate at the same time. As usual, I almost didn't order it but then thought "what the hell." I'm learning to recognize the moments when I should say "what the hell" and live a little.

Happy birthday to me! With luck, the next post will come from Aurora, Colorado, outside Denver. In the meantime I'll try to figure out why Hays exists, out here in the boonies, as opposed to being a tiny interstate stopover like the other towns I passed.