Vamos! To Kansas City, not in Kansas.

In which Sid and Doris change their minds on three matters.

First we change our minds about going to the Dodge City Boot Hill experience, despite its being open at 8am. The saloon girls would all chase after Sid and S would be afraid of the gunfighters, so all in all time to start the long day to Kansas City. Kansas City is in Missouri the other side of Kansas.

This means a utility breakfast in the hotel. Fresh Buttery Taste Spread. I can’t believe its not butter or perhaps something for the JGG’s door hinges.  Somewhat ironic as we are surrounded by stinky cows but maybe they are not dairy cows. We are hoping to meet up with a vegan friend in Kansas City and we start to understand his point of view.
On the outskirts of Dodge City is an air base with what looks like a fibreglass Martin Marauder for a gate guardian. Anyone got a better idea?

We are now in prime Cathedrals of the Prairie country, each served by the railway.  There is a great essay explaining the spacing of the grain elevators here, if our curious and engaging reader has a few spare minutes for a short diversion.

A more recent addition to the landscape is the windfarm, which makes sense as there is a lot of hot wind blowing. They are smaller than we see in Europe, perhaps because the weather here can be so severe. Using the accurate combination of the JGG’s speedo and Doris’s ability to count at 120bpm we calculate that the wind turbines are exactly 1/6th of a mile apart.  The miles fly past, six turbines at a time.

The real delight of the day is at Kinsley. Kinsley is one of several ‘centre of the US’ towns and was discovered as such by Picture Post sending a car from San Francisco and one from New York down a pre-set route. Kinsley is 1,561 miles from each according to their odometers.

More important is the Sod House and Museum. This is full of items from everyday life in the area up to about 1960. The Sod House they built in the 1950s (sorry Mifter Bat but it was a house built of sod, it didn’t belong to…) began to erode so a big shed was built over it. It is a bit bigger than the originals to accomodate a school party so they can see what raising a family in one room was like. Around the Sod House in the new shed are hundreds of farm tools and a major collection of different barbed wires, together with several guidebooks on “Bobbed Wire Collecting”.

In the big hall are room sets from 19th century and the early 20th. People have been bringing stuff for years. Including a Permanent Wave Machine which seems to have come off the set of War of the Worlds.

At the back of the hall is a blacksmiths cum workshop. The device in the foreground is a pedal driven knife grinder. There is also a Ford Model T Pickup rescued from a field. It is a great shame we have missed the Tired Old Iron Club meeting at Edwards County Fairgrounds.

We have a long way to go so we tear ourselves away (or rather, unhook ourselves from the barbed wire collections). It turns out it is 360 miles, which is a lot in an antique. Sid and Doris will drive, and just briefly “S” is elected deputy steerer.

Doris captures the local scene, clapboard houses and churches, stone built silos. All more verdant than Utah, as the countryside gets softer and prettier.  It turns out that we are following the original Santa Fe trail which may explain why we are passing many historic looking houses [all of which are irritatingly hard to photograph due to the original owners’ foresight in planting large shady trees in the front garden 100 years ago – D.]

The roads are still straight and we get gradually more heat-crazed as we close on Kansas City. Doris has booked an AirBnB house for our planned four night stay in KC. Before we arrive, but after we’ve paid the owner owns up that the private parking promised on the website and used as a key filter for our selection was a strategic error as the yard is full of a caravan renovation project. The house is in an area not yet the subject of gentrification and the “short walk” to Historic Downtown turns out to require a dash across a dual carriageway under a massive guano-dropping railway bridge.

Sid and Doris change their minds about staying here, cancel the fully paid booking and will argue the toss about a refund and the lies told on AirBnB later.

Instead we drive over to the Power and Light District to find a conventional hotel within walking distance of one or several nice bars. The drive through Down Town shows that KC is not a place for Sid and Doris to spend the planned 4 days. There is interesting architecture on Baltimore Avenue and we will give it a good looking at in the morning.

In the meantime dinner is fish tacos in a sports bar with a special “thank you” wave to Betka who introduced us to them all those weeks ago in Maryland.

 

After dinner we found a scale model of the solar system to put everything into perspective, and Sid was especially pleased to find the place where Jupiter wasn’t.

The plan to stop here till Friday is changed. We’ll be on our way to Independence and Springfield tomorrow.