I got out of the van at 0600 to see a beautiful sunrise (too slow to take photos though) and a small rabbit roaming around the van. Got our first use out of the travel shower in the morning as well. It’s a great idea and is just what you need after a long, hot, sweaty day of being in a van in such hot temperatures. We also got our first use out of the WonderWasher – laundering the clothes that needed it most.
While we were washing the clothes it started to rain. And it kept raining all day.
We called into Hutchinson Walmart to get the van serviced. We had time to kill so spent it roaming Walmart. Still get surprised by how cheap some stuff is. Looked very closely at some DSLR cameras but then thought better of it – given that we’re only just halfway through the trip.
Once the van was done, we called into Braum’s to get breakfast. I don’t recommend the grande burrito unless you REALLY like jalapenos or have a nose that’s so blocked you can’t taste them. I have a penchant for hot food but on this occasion I was glad I had the latter.
After breakfast we hit the road again. Our first destination being Dodge City – to catch up with the friend I mentioned in the previous entry. I’m in voluntary quarantine though – I’d rather stay in the van than go around infecting people! After I spent a couple of hours in the van, using the internet to update this blog and Facebook, I bunked down for a nap in the back. Being sick means I have little energy and I’m feeling pretty drained.
Eventually, after waking up, we headed off to Dodge City centre and a place called Boot Hill. It is a pioneer town and was really nifty the way they have preserved a section of the town as it was in the “olden days” I got a few quick snaps there and grabbed some lunch.
Then we started on our way again and headed towards Alburqueque, NM. Didn’t quite make it there though. We got to near the border of Texas (a place called Hooker) where the transmission in the van started playing up again. Not as major as the last time, but just a few hard gear changes. We were growing concerned that it was only going to get worse as the trip went on, so we decided to backtrack to Silver Lake, IN, store the van and hire a rental car from O’Hare airport. At least that way we’d have piece of mind.
On our way back to Silver Lake, we stopped in at Dorothy’s House (from the Wizard of Oz) which is now located in Liberal, KS. It has a yellow brick road and everything! Not really too much to see but worth it for nostalgia’s sake.
As I write this blog, we’re just about in Minneola, KS and it’s 2130. We’re going to drive for as long as we can tonight and hopefully get to Kansas City for the night. On the return trip, we’ll be shift driving, so it’ll be hard going but hopefully we can make up the ground we have lost.
We passed through Greenburg, KS at around 2214 – the town that was 95% flattened by tornadoes in 2007. There’s still a lot of flat land around and bulldozers dotted all over town.
We had earlier been talking about how you have to be careful on the Interstates because of animals (mainly deer) because they can be very hard to see. Low and behold, as we hurtled down the KS interstate in the dark, two domesticated dogs (Golden Retrievers, I believe) emerged out of the darkness. He slammed on the breaks and veered a little left, missing the dog on the right by no more than two inches and managing to successfully avoid the other dog as well. We’re not sure if the people behind us were as lucky – their headlights disappeared just after they would have reached the spot where the two dogs loitered. Scary stuff!
At 0020, we stopped at Towanda Service Area, just out of Wichita, for the night.