We were back on the road today, continuing our westward progress. We crossed the Missouri River at St. Joseph and continued west on US-36 into Kansas. The last time we were in Kansas, we had just been married in either 1879 or 1979. On that trip we crossed from Missouri into Kansas at Kansas City and drove through Emporia and into Colorado. During that crossing, we were amazed at how flat and grim the Kansas landscape was. I stupidly assumed all of Kansas looked like the southern part of the state and Dorothy’s back yard. Driving across northern Kansas on US-36 presented an entirely different landscape with gently rolling hills and extensive farm and ranch land. It was actually quite pretty.
About 180 miles west of St. Joseph we pulled off US-36 onto a rural road and pulled into Lovewell State Park. The park borders a big reservoir and we have full hookups but absolutely no phone and scant data. There is no wifi or internet communications on our phone, maybe because they don’t know about the internet here.
However, the sites are wide and spacious, there is almost nobody here and there are gigantic flocks of birds that we cannot identify. The biggest flocks appear to be some kind of gulls but we cannot find them in our bird spotter’s guides. Since the population of this part of America is almost non-existent, there is very little light pollution and the views of the Milky Way at night are stunning.
We got a few pix. Click the asterisk *