Flatland USA

In the morning Leon managed to contact the Seneca Rocks Visitor Center and confirm that he had indeed left his jacket and wallet there. He arranged for them to send it all to Tamara in Seattle. This good news brought the grin back to his face; he had been rather somber yesterday afternoon.

We checked out and had a big greasy breakfast at the Denny's across the road to celebrate the Mexican's good fortune. Waddled back to the truck, stopped at a nearby gas station to fill the tank and then, taking one last gasp of Dale's distressingly rural odor, we blasted off west along the I-64.

The drive today was dull; we made a pit stop somewhere halfway across Illinois. Leon bought himself a jolt cola purely because it advertised twice the legal caffeine limit allowable by law. Pretty soon he was driving the Cherokee like it was a Nintendo. Meanwhile the passing landscape had reduced my brain to the neural capacity of cold guacamole and I was hypnotized like a drooling vegetable.

Actually, dull doesn't quite do justice to the mind-numbingly unbroken flatness of these plains. It's like nothing is changing, like time has stopped and you're trapped in a never-ending loop. You couldn't possibly know what eternity means unless you've driven this road.

We stopped at St Louis, where the mighty Mississippi carves out the border between Illinois and Missouri. We did the tourist thing by taking pictures of the Gateway Arch and then gawped at gamblers in the nearby Casino Queen. Remember, gambling is a tax for the mathematically challenged.

Back in the jeep we ground through dozens of miles of strip mall Americana and heavy traffic west of St Louis. Escaping the madness we passed only two accidents (both single vehicle, an overturned truck and a still smoking car) on our way to Kansas City. In Kansas City we stopped for dinner, Leon had been here some years ago and remembered a recommendation that he hadn't acted on then. We found the steakhouse he was looking for and we got marvelous steaks. The service sucked somewhat though. Perhaps our haggard, dirty, unkempt and tired appearance didn't quite meet their dress standards. Too bloody bad I say. After getting horribly lost and driving in circles (sometimes quite tight circles) we eventually escaped into Kansas. Stopping at Junction City.

Junction City (Kansas), Monday March 26 (1804.7 miles)

Well Kansas is also pretty damn flat. But at least it wasn't entirely devoid of interest. We saw a herd of buffalo, a cool little natural history museum and an 8000-pound prairie dog. Perhaps I should elucidate on these wonders. The buffalo were a captive collection being held at a hobby farm near the road (I say hobby farm because it was less than one zillion acres), and we had passed them by almost before we were sure what we had seen. The little natural history museum was a place set up by a woman in the early 20th century who collected among other things a literal ton of fossilized shark's teeth. The walls of this place were festooned with examples of the interesting collages you could make with lots of little shark teeth and other bits and pieces, the best one was a depiction of a prehistoric shark made entirely of shark teeth alone. This woman must have gone out of her mind. The giant prairie dog had been an advertisement aimed at getting tourists off the bloody highway and into someone's tourist trap. However, the thought of a Colossus of Rodents was too terrifying for us, so we drove away as fast as possible.

Kansas is also very, very big. This is evidenced by the many signs we saw advertising various attractions for which we only had to take the next exit, turn left and drive 300 miles. Leon wasn't paying full attention and nearly plowed right through the heart of Dodge City, missing it by a mere 150 miles. Of course he was totally oblivious to our close shave.

As we neared Colorado the temperature was dropping and we noticed some snow lying about, very depressing. Across the border we found the state cloaked in a dense fog. Cars and trucks loomed out of the half-light as we drifted towards Denver, stopping only at Limon for pizza and Excedrin. Leon was pretty disappointed in the weather because he had wanted to see the front range of the Rocky Mountains as we arrived. In Denver we booked into a motel, exhausted after 550 miles of hypnotizingly dull driving.