Greetings from Kansas, campers!

I was going to write last night about how every place we've been so far looks like someplace we've been before. Northern Mississippi looked like Western Maryland. Parts of Missouri looked like parts of Vermont... you get the idea. Given the homogenization of America even many of the businesses looked the same.

That changed today. Here's what we did... a long-ish day, but pushing North and West.

Silver Cliche's route for June 18

By the time we got west of Topeka (its the State capital!) and approached Kansas (KSU country!) the significance of the geography and landscape changed remarkably. Neither Mrs. C' nor I have spent time in the dead center of the country. I'd say we've missed something.

Far from the rumored flat landscape (that comes later), the eastern part of Kansas has significant rolling hills. Even on I-70 it was common to have big elevation changes mile-to-mile. The Tundra worked hard today. A small warm up for Colorado.

We stopped in another small town... Ottawa... not the capital of Canada... the county seat of Franklin County. I'll try to post some pics on Flickr tomorrow... getting late now.

From Ottawa on to Milford Lake, the largest lake in Kansas. Here's the view from the trailer tonight:

We are in a totally secluded part of the Corps of Engineers campground here. The site I booked was not so good. We asked to switch (having scoped out all the empty spots and eyeballed a couple of nice ones). The one we picked it turns out is a "primitive" site... no water... no electricity. Guess what? Nobody wants those sites, we are totally alone here. But I fired up the generators and we have 40 gallons of fresh water on board and 100 lbs of propane or something so we will be just fine. I'll power down and close up in a bit.

On to Western Kansas tomorrow then we stay put for a day before heading to Colorado.

Later!

SC