Vamos! To Dodge City, in Kansas.

In which Sid and Doris go east along the Arkansas River to meet a working girl in Dodge City.

The day starts with a strong winds and rain warning for Kansas. But that is for the north of Kansas where we are not, so we set off for an averagely downhill day. We pass fields full of old cars, fields full of grass, fields, grass. Doris times the car from one horizon to the next and works out that we can see about 15 miles.

Rolling across Colorado towards Kansas is as full of incident as we had been warned. We will keep showing straight roads through scrubby grass with some small contour because we cannot magic up Monument Valley every day.

We bid farewell to the Rockies in the rear window.

People live in clumps of trailers in fields.  People keep clumps of rusty old iron in fields.  Sometimes it is difficult to tell the difference between the the two.

Highlights seen from the car include a unicyclist sculpture opposite High Mesa Farm, which we missed as a picture but found on Google Streetview.  We are only including it because there is nothing else so interesting for 40 miles around.

This is a Doris drives, Sid drives, eat Subway lunch, see town
of Lamar, Doris drives, Sid drives, arrive at Dodge City sort of day.

There is some good news, there are many crickets and butterflies out so we are are not at Silent Spring. Though the amount of butterflies might suggest someone has had a caterpillar problem.

We do not stop until Lamar at about 170 miles. It has not had a sparkly past having suffered through the Dust Bowl and needed help from the Civil Works Administration, Federal Emergency Relief Organisation and the Works Progress Administration. One saving grace is the Amtrak rail stop where we are pleased to see the 2-6-2 Baldwin rotting peacefully to itself after a million mile career lasting from 1906 to 1953.

There may be some tourism as the town, like much of our route today it is on the Santa Fe National Historic Trail.

We go on as strong side winds push us around and the temperature exceeds 95 degrees. If we slow down a bit we can have the air con on with a water temperature under 200.

We see some interesting clouds.  We see some interesting silos.  We see a railway and a gas pipeline. Time for a break for some education, dear reader:

At Granada in the 1980s a teacher began to study the remains of Camp Amache, an Internment / Relocation Camp for Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor. While it was one of the smaller such camps it was still the tenth largest ‘town’ in Colorado at the time. It seems to have been humanely run, though whether the camps were required at all was a question then as now. Some of the men joined up and by the end of the war their unit was one of the most decorated. More to be found at www.thegreathighprairie.com.

 We have passed the day by the young Arkansas river and the railway. The South Western Chief passenger train runs from Chicago to Los Angeles stopping at Lamar though only runs because of pressure from local senators. Our conveyance of the day is this triple headed Burlington, Northern and Santa Fe freight train seen near Ingalls.

Ingalls is also home to many cattle feed lots. These are not fields but are outdoor pens to which food is brought. The smell is rather special as they are quite densely packed and cows have been weeing on the same patch of earth for over 100 years. There are now a million cattle within 100 miles of Dodge City.

Dodge City was a major staging post for cowboys bringing Long Horns up from Texas before and after the Civil War. (The town had the reputation Aberdeen had when the oil boom hit Scotland and men had money to spend and not much time to spend it, though in Aberdeen there was less shooting.) The Long Horns carried a tick that brought sickness to local herds and the trade was outlawed in Eastern Kansas. That quarantine was later extended, the cattle trails moved west and the girls and gun-fighters moved on too. The main industry now is meat packing which isn’t making anyone rich, except maybe Cargill.

There is tourism. The Boot Hill tours are run by ladies in appropriate costumes who greet Sid and Doris as we ask about the open air museum. It will open at 8am, Sid and Doris will be there.

In the meantime here is Sid losing his pocket money to a consumptive dentist, name of Doc Holliday. And thanks to the technical wizardry of the iPhone camera, some artistic shots of sidings at sunset.