Post 16: 27 June, from Sterling KS

I am loving Kansas!

Perhaps my affection has been bought by the tail winds (for the most part) which I have benefited from both yesterday and today. And big ones too. This morning - honestly - I stopped pedalling for a short while at 15 mph on the flat, and I was still accelerating just from the wind! I really felt sorry for the east-bound riders I have met in recent days if they were fighting today's wild wind....

People seem friendlier than ever in this State. Just one example, from this morning. A pick-up truck was waiting for me at an intersection, and when I reached him, the driver called out to ask if I had enough water or Gatorade; he said he had both, ice-cold, if I needed any. How truly kind that was, quite humbling.

A majestic Kansas sky

I love the huge skies here in Kansas. A local person said to me two days ago, that if you don't like the weather in Kansas, wait 10 minutes and it will change. Certainly the skies change constantly, especially - while I have been here - in the mornings. Huge piles of clouds suddenly form and re-form, with great majesty. (I am told that thunderstorms can brew up very quickly too!)

But it has been hot. Yesterday Wichita, quite close, reached 107F, some kind of new record. And according to the TV in my room, at 8pm it was 100F in the next nearest town!

Typical Kansas landscape

Because the terrain is pretty flat roads can be built dead straight. And they are! On the map they look very geometric, and typically they will go either due east-west, or due north-south. Yesterday I was on a dead straight road for 40 miles, and tomorrow I will be on one that has no bend for more than 50 miles! (Did the Romans come and lay down the roads in Kansas?)

This road was dead straight for 40 miles!

My observation a few Posts ago about never being far from a wood or a forest doesn't hold so true now on the prairies. Yesterday was primarily cattle country, and the big herds (of, I think, black guernseys) make me wonder what these plains would have looked like 150 years ago covered by far far larger herds of bison.

Today, though, I have been riding through arable country, wheat or corn. (It was appropriate that I noticed a road called "Wheat State Road"!)And towns are visible from a long way away, not on account of church towers or steeples as sometimes in England, but because of the tall grain silos.

The grain silos dominate these towns...

In both pasture and arable land, one sees little oil wells, with the oil pumped up by what I have heard called elsewhere 'nodding donkeys'. (A store owner, today though, had never heard that term!)

A "nodding donkey"

Talking of cattle, entering Eureka (population 2914) I was amused to read a notice boasting that it was or is the home of the 1983 "World Champion [no less!] Steer Wrestler". (Hands up who knew that already.....)

It is interesting to learn, when one can, why people do the TransAm ride. An eastbound rider happened be in the same Eureka motel as me, and we went out for supper together. Dean lives near San Francisco, and is a veteran of the Vietnam war. He is riding to Washington DC to visit the Vietnam Memorial there, to honour six guys he knew who were killed in that war (three were in the same platoon). As he said, he could have jumped on a plane in SF, but that would have been rather casual; instead he is making a real pilgrimage in memory of those six. I found that very moving, especially since he has had some difficulties through sickness on the trip.

Another cyclist I met, Ann, has a very different motive. She is a management consultant, interested in what makes people enjoy their jobs. She is riding across the States, interviewing as many people as she can about their attitude to their work, as material for a book. (She sort of interviewed me, so of course I extolled the advantages of employee ownership - never miss an opportunity!)

I know I have sometimes commented on some of the towns I pass through being in apparent decline. This morning I was hugely heartened when I stopped to have a snack-stop in a small town called Buhler. It seems to be really thriving. There is an impressive soft-furnishings store that could have been transplanted from, say, a prosperous market town in England; a mill converted by a local businessman into a local theatre; a good grocery store, run by a delightful lady called Liz, and other obvious signs of enterprise and vitality. Sitting on a bench on the sidewalk outside Liz's store, and eating a huge chocolate muffin, several passers-by stopped to talk. Just typical of the friendliness of Kansas.

Part of Buhler's attractive main street

A couple more names, in closing. I thought "Old Settlers Road" sounded very evocative. But to attract visitors I thought that "Pete's Puddle Recreational Park" lacked something....

All best wishes to all, Ken