Today was another travel day so we got back onto US-36 again and turned west. We have been on US-36 from east of St. Jo, MO, and have now covered about 400 miles along this route. It has been a great road through northern Kansas with great scenery and exceptional paving. During our trip today, we encountered one of the reasons the paving is so good; the state runs a paving operation that uses massive propane burners to heat up the road paving, a planer scalps off the top of the paving, some asphalt oil is added, a paving machine then picks up the recycled material and spreads it where the paving was scalped. Right behind the paving machine comes huge rollers and then a guy comes out and paints stripes on the brand-new road surface. Driving along this recycled road is very smooth and we had no trouble maintaining the 65 mile per hour speed limit even though the road is one lane each way.
We noted that they have many weird insects here. There are 2” long creatures that look like worms but run like centipedes. There are flying critters that, although tiny, have long tail things that make a 3/4” bug 3” long. There are dragonflies everywhere and they make huge globs when they hit the radiator and windshield. Windshield wipers are not effective against these glue bugs.
After about 120 miles on US-36, we pulled off at another Kansas state park called Prairie Dog. It is a very nice park with – you guessed it – a big prairie dog colony. They are very cute little pear-shaped critters. There is an adjacent lake, the RV spaces are big, the roads are great and our satellite antenna works great. The satellite antenna requires an unobstructed view to the south and from here in Kansas the next obstruction to the south would be Venezuela.
We took a couple pix on the road. See them by clicking the asterisk *