Nine States/Ten Days

A WRITER'S WIT
Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.
Honoré de Balzac
Born May 20, 1799

OK, KS, & NE

Roadside Park, Stratford, in Texas Panhandle

For some time I’ve wanted to make a road trip to visit a number of states I’ve never been to before. To get there, however, Ken and I had to travel through a few we were quite familiar with. It didn’t seem to matter; we found new and different sights to see.

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Mid-America Air Museum

As we crossed the Oklahoma Panhandle, it seemed about as spare and barren as parts of the Texas panhandle—the leanest thirty-five miles you’ll ever see (for us, about sixty miles, since the highway crossed at an angle). Just over the border into Kansas we visited the Mid-America Air Museum in Liberal. I’d previously toured the Smithsonian’s new Aerospace Museum outside Washington, DC, in Virginia, but the Liberal museum was a fair match, boasting over a hundred planes. We spent about an hour there, and I shot a number of photographs. Then onward we drove to Garden City, Kansas, where we would spend the first night.

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Garden City KS City Park

It’s amazing, but establishments such as Holiday Inn Express and Hampton Inns and many others have become ubiquitous, even in a place as isolated as Garden City. I’d visited the town once before, when my college choir was on tour. It was 1968 and I’d brought Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood with me to read on the long bus rides between concerts. That January day had been cold, the elms stripped of their leaves. Now, the town of 26,000 seemed refreshed, with signs of money flowing through it like the underground water used to keep everything so green. We ate dinner at the Golden Dragon, not far from our hotel. Talk about ubiquitous. I’m always amazed that Asian restaurants can be found in even the most remote locations of our country. And the food was good.

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Ken and Friend (Antelope)

The next day we hunted down the Monument Rocks National Natural Landmark in Gove County. You have to follow a number of dirt roads that are deemed impassable during inclement weather (according to its website), but on May 9 the roads were dusty and relatively smooth. Ken explained to me how such a sea formation came about, how it has lasted throughout the millennia. The rocks are apparently unmanaged, and there is no charge, no asphalt parking, no facilities. While we were there, only one other party pulled up in their car to check it out. After thirty minutes of listening to the bird life, observing the bovine populations, marveling over this natural structure, we found Highway 83 once again and headed north.

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Cooper Barn at Prairie Museum

In Oakley we attempted to visit the Fick Fossil and History Museum, but its new structure was still under construction, and so we drove on to Colby, Kansas. There we stopped and visited the Prairie Museum of Art and History. It is similar to Wichita’s Cowtown or Lubbock’s National Ranching Heritage Museum, but each region has its own particular gems, and if such structures are maintained, they will continue to inform school children and adults alike what our frontier country was like.

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Late afternoon, continuing to follow Highway 83, we headed for North Platte, Nebraska. Though I grew up in Kansas, I’d never visited this state before. The highway took us through Nebraska’s central region, gently rolling hills in places, smooth agricultural surfaces in others. We easily found our motel, in spite of its sort of hidden location, and we walked across a dusty path to eat at Whisky Creek Fire Wood Grill instead of waiting in line for thirty minutes at a nearby franchise restaurant. We shared a meal in a booth and talked about our day.

On May 10, because we were anxious to reach Rapid City, South Dakota, we headed straight for our destination instead of stopping off to see much in between. There would be much to observe once we arrived.

NEXT TIME: SD, ND, & MT

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