This morning Scout and I left St. Louis at 7:30 in the most unbearable heat and humidity I've ever experienced. Last night at 9:45, it was still 94 degrees, and when I opened the door to the hotel room, it was like stepping into a sauna. This morning's drive across the top of MO would have been quite scenic if not for the constant barrage of gigantic billboards advertising everything from the local university to Grandma's fudge to one car dealer who seemed to like doing Burma Shave-type sequential signs. We also crossed the mighty Missouri River which was actually in flood, which surprised me. This must still be the result of the gigantic snow melt in the Rockies this year.
Then we entered Kansas City, where they seem to like their professional sports a lot (multiple venues for multiple teams) and where the drivers act like they learned to drive in Indianapolis (although I didn't see any blimps). As we drove west across Kansas, it got hotter and hotter and less humid and there was an amazing shift in the scenery along about Manhattan and Topeka. First, the vistas opened up dramatically and it was easy to see for miles and miles in any direction from the highway. There were fewer trees and crops and more open grassland. About the only things that broke the horizon line were grain silos and electronics towers. Both of my parents' families migrated across this section of our great country to Colorado, and I wondered today as I sped along in air-conditioned comfort how this arid and barren land must have appeared to them.
Salina is probably a very nice little town but in the 107-degree heat (114 with the heat index), Scout and I didn't spend much time looking about except to get gas and escape into an air-conditioned motel room. Even he couldn't take it and he'll put up with just about anything to play with his ball. Right now, he's asleep on the bed behind me, with his nose toward the AC. I am carrying a very special oil painting by Chief Muraina Oyelama, an amazing Nigerian artist who was a Copeland Fellow at Amherst College when I worked in the Black Studies department. I didn't want to take a chance of shipping it with the movers because I thought the van would get too hot for the oils. Well, tonight I brought it inside the motel room just in case it got too hot in the car!
Thoughts on today's travels:
- Kansas motorcyclists join their brothers and sisters in other states in the anti-helmet campaign. Today I would have also worried about sunstroke!
- Kansas has a 70 MPH speed limit, which means that it's okay to do 80!
- I'm getting terrible gas mileage, which is probably a function of the load in the car, running the AC, and the heat.
- A sign at a Salina Midas Muffler shop: "Don't play leapfrog with a unicorn!" (No, I'm not kidding.)
- Saw my first Herefords today (those are the white-faced red cattle for those of you who are wondering), along with stock pens, cowboy hats hung in the rear windows of (lots) of pick-up trucks, and had some authentic Mexican food for dinner tonight!
Tomorrow we drive to La Junta, CO, which is close to Rocky Ford, where my mother's parents homesteaded and which is where I spent the best summer vacations of my childhood. I hope to spend some time looking around, visiting their old farm (unfortunately long gone from the family), and revisiting some very special old memories, before I head toward home (in Arroyo Hondo) on the 3rd. Part of the drive tomorrow will not be on the interstate, which will be a welcome change. If we hadn't had to beat the movers to NM, I really would have loved to have taken some of the scenic smaller roads to our destination. We truly do live in a great and amazing country and to experience it at a less frantic pace and on its own terms is very special indeed--I know this from personal experience.
Until tomorrow then......
