Day 4 - 5/11/07 (Kansas, Oklahoma City, OK)

Today was supposed to be a pretty boring day. Driving about 680 miles, mostly through Kansas, didn’t really evoke any excitement…at most maybe some hopes I’d see some cool Wizard of Oz references on the side of the road, or, if I’m really lucky, Superman and Smallville.

Kansas wasn’t as flat as I expected it to be. Definitely no mountains, but there were hills, a lot of green as far reaching as I could see. It was landscape I had never seen before, at least not that vast. While it wasn’t the most exciting thing I’ve ever seen and I probably wouldn’t volunteer to drive it again tomorrow, I did enjoy doing it. The highlight of Kansas occurred while I driving on the interstate, as ‘they’ call it. I saw a small plane fly by and crop dust this farm right next to the road. How Kansas is that?! If it wasn’t for the fact that I was driving with one hand and eating Doritos with the other, I would have been able to react faster and take a better picture, but this one will have to do.

To make things more interesting, I took a detour I found on http://www.byways.org/. This site has a lot of scenic side trips that if you are driving cross country, I recommend you look into, especially if you don’t have a lot of time and just want to drive by something cool. This particular byway took me on a 60 mile side route into a farming town of Kansas. It was crazy to go down this small paved road for so many miles and see only the random house or farm. The only roads coming off the road I was on were dirt roads. I stopped a few times to get out and walk around. When I did, all I heard was silence and some birds chirping… in my tv/movie influenced mind, the birds reminded me of that scene in Shawshank Redemption when Red goes to the haystacks to find the box. I did hit a small little town while during this byway and, with the same thinking as the previous example, it reminded me of Clark Kent’s Smallville home, complete with the high school mascot painted on the water tower.

One final thought on byways…they aren’t major roads, so anticipate problems. As I got to the end of this byway I found a sign saying the road I needed to take was closed because a bridge was out. I assume this was due to last week’s tornado in Kansas, but I’m not sure. Fortunately, I was able to easily find another way out by backtracking my path a bit over the past half hour, but it could have been much worse.

Oklahoma was the end of the day. It was definitely flat, and minus a nice sunset, not so great to look at. I was planning to go to the Oklahoma City Memorial in the morning. I noticed that the website said the outside memorial was open 24 hours and remember thinking how ridiculous it was that it actually said it was open 24 hours…who would go in the middle of the night. By chance, I drove by it on my way to my motel around 11pm and there was actually a good amount of people there walking around. I was shocked and decided I needed to get out and explore further. The memorial was really well done. It not only looked nice, but you can feel the weight of what happened just by looking at the different aspects of the memorial…such as the large gates bordering the memorial with a reflecting pool between each side, one side labeled 9:01 the minute before the bombing when life was innocent, and the gate on the other side labeled 9:03, the minute after when nothing would be the same again. They also had chairs lit up to, regular size ones for every adult that was killed and 19 small ones for every child. I spoke to the Park Ranger, who is also there 24 hours, and he said that he has seen people there at all times of day and at all times of the year. Pretty remarkable.I ended the evening at my first Waffle House eating grits. Finally, congrats to all my friends graduating today at Marhsall!

Fast Facts:

Today's Mileage: 715 (by far the longest day)
Total Mileage: 1,937

Today's Gas Price: $3.05 (gas prices are finally going down. Thankfully, motel prices are dropping as well.)