SEE THE USA IN YOUR CHEVROLET

Coast to Coast and Border to Border

April 30 to June 9, 2004

Kansas has irrigated fields in circular format with the end of the apparatus pivoting around a well head...you've seen them from the air.  At the state line with CO, the time changes to one hour earlier.  Hwy. 50 has markers saying "Mountain route of the Santa Fe Trail."  A railroad parallels Hwy. 50 from La Junta, CO, through Kansas.  A pheasant stood in the field.  The major scent of Kansas is cattle manure from giant feed lots.  Few cattle along Hwy. 50 feed on range grass.  Entering Dodge City, Hwy. 50 is called Wyatt Earp Blvd.  The sounds of the Kansas countryside are meadow larks and semi trucks passing in opposite direction on the two-lane road, three feet away.  Signts of Kansas are water towers and grain elevators.  Wheat fields are just heading out and corn fields still show stubble from last years harvest.  Some fields have three-inch corn among last year's stubble.  May is a great month to travel, you can see farther across the countryside without tall corn blocking your view.  Other, more pleasant scents of Kansas, are grass, trees, hay, and freshly plowed ground.  Cool morning drives provide time to reflect about my family, Sue, Matthew and Carla.  I see cars with license plates so dirty you can't read them, yet a group of artists with pallets are set up along a creek.  Birds sing in the fields and buzzards soar alone far above the roadway.  Three turkeys are in the grass along I-35 and a crane flys overhead.  Large white-blossomed trees that smell like plumaria are locust trees.  Schools are out May 20 in this region.  If you ever pass this way, I left a hubcap at Timber Crest Road, west of the Railroad nearing Washington, MO.

--Holcomb, Kansas, USA

--Garden City, Kansas, USA

Best preserved Santa Fe Trail wagon ruts are numes west of Dodge City.  Large sign west of Howell grain elevator, in a rolling field 100 yards north of the parking area.

--Dodge City, Kansas, USA

"Hell on the Plaines" a norotious place between the railroad arrival in 1872 and the end of cattle drives in 1884.  Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp were marshals here and a Boot Hill cemetery proves it.  Boot Hill Museum on the west side of town, north of the railroad tracks along Wyatt Earp Blvd. has a historic Santa Fe locomotive.  Kansas Teachers' Hall of Fame is across the street from Boot Hill.

--Kinsley, Kansas, USA

"Midway USA" 1,561 miles from San Francisco and New York City is proclaimed by a large sign outside the Edwards County Historical Museum with railroad and farm equipment.  Here Route 50 parallels the main line of the Santa Fe Railroad across 50 miles of Kansas cornfields

--Hutchinson, Kansas, USA

Hutchinson has the world's longest grain elevator, over a half mile, and old salt mines where Hollywood film negatives are stored.

--Newton, Kansas, USA

We stayed in Newton, KS, because down I-135 we had reservations at the Pairie Rose Chuckwagon Dinner Show.  We donned our cowboy hats and boots and drove through the country to Benton, KS, for the show and Hopalong Cassidy Museum.

--Cottonwood Falls, Kansas, USA

Nearest town to the new Tallgrass Prairie national Preserve.  Two miles north of Strong City on US 50, it is an 11,000 acre preserve for the head-high flowering grasses that give the tallgrass prairie its name.  The Chase County Courthousle is the oldest still in use in the state.

--Emporia, Kansas, USA