Before we get into this, we note that a few days after returning from a short trip we turned on our computer and got a message reading, “Hmmm…can’t reach this page.” The message offered to connect me with my usual first page by using a different web address. I tried that and that didn’t work either.   Going back to the previous “can’t reach this page” page, I noticed another line:

“Report this issue.”

I wonder how many people have gotten similar messages and have clicked on that line before giving themselves a good solid dope-slap.

Now, on to our stories:

(Oh? What did I do about that “report this issue” message? None of your business. And besides, the red mark on my forehead has disappeared.)

I always get a good chuckle, if not a good laugh, from audiences when I say that God invented Kansas so Missourians would appreciate Colorado more when they get there.   Problem is, you don’t start seeing hazy mountains in front of you until you’re more than 100 miles into Colorado. I consider that area for several miles west of Limon to be Kansas West.

And in truth, Nancy and I don’t mind driving across Kansas all that much. A lot of our ancestors were pioneers who were there when corn was the dominant crop. We like the way the sky opens up, enjoy the Flint Hills, and the rolling prairies.

It’s easier to enjoy those things at 80 mph instead of looking at the back end of the oxen for the month it took thousands of people headed to the mountains 150 years ago.

Best name for a Kansas town: Grainfield. It’s three counties in from the Colorado border, a little place of about 275 people, that topped out at 417 in the 1980 census. Children from Grainfield attend Wheatland High School (another appropriate name), where the sports teams used to be called the Shockers, as in shocks of wheat (we mention that for the city folks who think the kids might have done weird science with electricity). They’re the Thunderhawks now.

Grainfield’s old opera house is on the National Historic Register. We don’t know when the last opera or any other performance was held there. The place is an antique shop now. Not surprisingly, it’s the dominant building in a town that, like a lot of small Kansas farming towns (one up north particularly close to your observer’s heart) seems to be shrinking back into the prairie.

But if you’re on I-70 and not enjoying the experience as much as we do, you might drop in on Grainfield.

Or just down the road, at Quinter, which boasts the Fick Fossil Museum (do not try to say that real fast too many times). The oldest Mosasaur skull in the world is on display there.

Not far away is Oakley, which is near Castle Rock and Monument Rocks, the chalk remnants of the great inland sea that split present North America into two land masses about one-hundred million years ago. Nearby Quinter, about 30 miles from Oakley, is Castle Rock, from the same time period.

—The features live on in the Kansas University cheer, “Rock, Chalk, Jayhawk.” At least we suspect that’s where it came from, should any Missourians care.

Incidentally, all of this silly Kansas-Missouri animosity aside, we like Lawrence and we think the KU campus perched on Mount Oread (seen from the interstate) is a lovely campus. It, too, has a nice fossil museum but it’s most famous museum attraction is the hide of Comanche, the Seventh Cavalry Horse that survived Custer’s ill-considered attack in Montana. The hide is stretched over a taxidermy mount so it looks like the horse. Although Comanche is sometimes described as “the only survivor of Custer’s Last Stand,” he isn’t. A lot of Indians survived. And about half of Custer’s troops survived a few miles away on another hill.

As long as we’re providing you with a travelogue, you might consider drifting off the interstate about 115 miles east of Quinter, in the Ellsworth area, and going to Lucas, which is the home of The Garden of Eden. We wrote about it years ago on the old Missourinet blog—about a Civil War Veteran who hated corporations and decorated his house built out of concrete logs with concrete anti-corporation figures and figures from the Genesis story of the Garden of Eden, something bizarre to many visitors but also an interesting piece of self-expression through folk art.

Of course, if you want to get up near Highway 36 you can visit the largest ball of twine, in Cawker City, or if you want to drop down to Highway 50, you can climb down into the world’s largest hand-dug well at Greensburg—and while you’re there you can appreciate the effort to rebuild the town after it was flattened by a tornado almost twenty years ago.

We always enjoy driving through the miles-long Smoky Hills Wind Farm about 140 miles west of Topeka. There are 155 of these giant three-bladed machines, some close enough to the road that we can appreciate how big those things are. There’s an interesting juxtaposition near the eastern end of the farm, a church with a big windmill nearby:

 

I call the image “Higher Powers.”   This picture isn’t a good one. It was shot with a cell phone while Nancy was driving about 80. One of these days I’m going to have the good camera and we’re going to stop and do it right. We find these big wind turbines (the official name; I guess “windmills” are the old things we sometimes also see along the road that pump water for livestock) kind of fascinating.

We “enjoy” running on a couple of toll roads in the Denver area.  We saw “enjoy” because they don’t have toll booths.  Cameras take pictures of our car’s license plate and a week or two later a statement arrives in our mail box saying how much we owe the state of Colorado.

Saw a headline in the Longmont, Colorado newspaper that recalled an old television comedy show and we—for some reason—thought, “Ralph Kramden would be proud.”   For those few who peruse these entries who do not know about Ralph Kramden, let us perform an educational service.

 Ralph Kramden was a television character in “The Honeymooners” skits, a New York bus driver in the 1950s and 60s who made $62 a week and who lived in a small tenement apartment with his wife of fifteen years, Alice. Ralph was a bombastic, fat, man with who was often scheming on ways to get rich. His schemes, often hatched with sidekick Ed Norton, an always-cheerful sewer worker who lived with his wife, Trixie, in the apartment upstairs, never worked. Alice was the queen of the put-down who dreamed of a better life that included a refrigerator that didn’t need to have a bowl underneath it collect water that dripped from the ice box. Sometimes she would irritate Ralph with her spot-on observations of his girth or job or scheme and he would, in anger, threaten:

“One of these days, One of these days, Alice: Pow! Bang, Zoom, you’re going to the Moon.”

It was funny then and it remains funny in the context of its times. Of course, it wouldn’t play at all, now. But those were different times. By the end of the skit, the humbled Ralph would tell Alice, “You’re the best,” and they would kiss and the screen would fade to black and then to a commercial.

Ralph Kramden was played by Jackie Gleason, who might be remembered by some younger—but increasingly older—movie viewers as Sheriff Buford T. Justice from the “Smokey and the Bandit” films. Alice was played by Audrey Meadows. You can still see “The Honeymooners” sketches on various YouTube videos.

Ralph, a prophet in his way, and Alice, the beneficiary, might find that headline, uh, meaningful, I thought.

Longmont, by the way, is the hometown of Vance Brand, an astronaut who was the command module pilot on the 1975 flight that linked a leftover Apollo capsule with a Soviet Soyuz capsule for the famous “handshake in space” that was the first American-Soviet joint space venture. He also flew three shuttle flights, including the first fully-operational flight. He might have walked on the Moon if there had been an Apollo 18 mission.

Well, enough of these latest notes from the road, which culminated with a hike to 12,005 feet and an involuntary geological study of the relative hardness of my head with some Rocky Mountain granite that left a temporary mark on my forehead and some marks on the granite that will wash off in the next rainstorm.   Conclusion: both seem to be of equal hardness.

—which might explain why we drive across Kansas rather than fly over it.