Sunday 13th November – The big drive across Kansas

The USA had Veteran’s day on Friday but back home today would be Remembrance Sunday.  Luckily, there was a memorial garden in Wamego that was an apt place for us to stop for some quiet deliberation for a couple of minutes.

Apologies for the 'bug splatter' (but it gives this photo more content...)

We then needed to eat up some mileage to make it to our next destination, Dodge City.  Wow, it’s true what they say, Kansas is really vast, really flat and the scenery is reaaally dull....

Passenger's view of Kansas..... for hours....

Sorry Kansas, but after mile upon mile of flat, treeless pasture land and scrub it was hard to feel like we were making progress.  We took photos because it is hard to sufficiently describe the ‘nothingness’.  It reminds you to have a healthy respect for the size of the country that we are traversing. We had packed a ‘Beginners Spanish’ book with accompanying CD for such times.  With plans to visit Spain and South America in our future, having knowledge of some basic conversational Spanish would not go amiss.  And so, being on cruise control for some very straight and featureless roads did not go to waste, though please don’t test either of us yet!

By chance more than anything we stopped to swap over driver responsibility next to an old steam train in a place called Kinsley, which just happened to be the middle of the USA! 

1561 miles either way to San Francisco on the West Coast and New York in the East. 

Also, randomly, a collection of barb wire!

It was only a short drive on to the outskirts of Dodge City:

We had been getting into the habit of ringing ahead to potential campsites just to double check that they had room and let them know to expect us that afternoon.  Today was one such example, we had given Blue RV park in Dodge my name and our estimated arrival time.  This was a Passport America site and as soon as we arrived it struck us as a very dusty and busy site with many of the occupants looking particularly permanent, i.e. it looked more like a trailer park than a transient RV park.  And that was without the SMELL!  I jumped out to try to find the office or the owner to check in.  The odour that hit us is hard to describe because I don’t think I’ve smelt it before!  It wasn’t a farmyard or slurry smell.  It was warm, dusty and ‘meaty’ with a tinge of burning hair smell?  You get the picture, it was rank!  I did my best to find someone but to no avail.  I rang and left a message on a cell number and we looked dejectedly at the one spare site we had found near to the main road considering whether to hook ourselves up.  It was barren and dusty.  We both considered staying in Dodge at all due to the smell.  ‘Is it just this campsite…. Or do you think the WHOLE of Dodge is going to smell like this?’ I asked Simon.  Neither of us were sure but there was only one way of finding out.  It had been a lucky fluke that we hadn’t been able to check in.  Instead, we drove away as rapidly as we could in the search for another RV park option, preferably in a more sweet-smelling spot!

Luck was with us again.  We found the Watersports RV Park a couple of miles away, still within close proximity to Dodge, but clearly not in the same wind direction as Blue RV park!  It transpires that the reason for the smell is Dodge’s success in the Cattle processing plants business.  Trucks continue to come and go from the plants continually allowing 5000 cattle per day to be ‘processed’.  Hence the very original, mystery stench that envelopes much of the surrounding area.  Grim.

Supermoon - Looks like a photo of a street light?I

Tonight was the best opportunity for viewing the ‘Supermoon’ so I was hoping we would have a bright clear sky for this being in the middle of a prairie.  Yes, the moon was very bright and seemed quite large but I can’t say it was anything particularly extraordinary: