Remember, of course, that we had Sports Life Camp from 9-12 M-Th. I won’t say it didn’t cause stress as I sat there eight or nine miles from my house every morning without being able to go home and pack. Not to mention the car seemed to be running rough on Wednesday, to my horror. But, without giving you a bunch of boring details, it all worked out, and by 3:30 pm on Thursday afternoon, everyone was pumped up and belted in the car. We pointed the van’s nose towards the setting sun and drove our silver Conestoga down the road along with everybody else leaving town. Surprisingly, the traffic wasn’t too bad. We blew through Lawrence (torched by John Brown and home of the championship Jayhawks!) and Topeka (our friendly state capital—hey, is that a metal Indian on top of the Statehouse?), Abilene (beef from the trail, anyone?) and Salina (hmm…don’t really have anything to say about that). After Salina, we begin the long slow climb through the High Plains—though wave after wave of prairie hills and treeless horizons. Our destination was Hays, where we were staying in a REAL hotel with a waterslide. It brought back a flood of memories for me, as that stretch of road is one the Harnden family had traveled quite often in our near decade in the West. And, of course, we can’t forget that two year interlude in Hays itself!
As we topped a prairie swell, we saw a new sight: windmills covering the hillsides as far as the eyes could see (and let me tell you, that’s a long way in Kansas). These aren’t your little farm-dealies either—these were positively enormous, a hundred to a hundred and fifty feet high. They were clean and modern, three-bladed, and really quite beautiful to watch in motion. I don’t know how much energy they were providing—some of those gigantic blades were motionless, and others were only spinning rather reluctantly. But hey, worth a try, I suppose.
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