Tumbleweeds & Trivia!

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Today is the day! We are restarting our trip… destination San Diego. But first we have to actually start - we were a little delayed due to a midnight phone call from Maria’s brother. We needed to scan and e-mail some information to Australia… using a dial-up connection - hence the delay! But the sky is clear and the forecast says something about snow in Colorado, but even though we need to travel as fast as possible we are not sure we will get that far…

Statistics

Starting Destination: Saint George, Kansas
Ending Destination: Limon, Colorado
Ending Destination GPS: N: 39° 16.306’ W: 103° 42.582’ Elev: 5437’
Miles Driven: 445.4

Trivia King

With many miles to drive and not very many days, we decided to take the quickest route towards our interim destination - Interstate 70… It was nearly noon when we started so we were feeling the pressure to get as many miles under our belt as possible - so we cheated, and got McDonalds for lunch!! Driving in western Kansas along the interstate, there isn’t much to see if you can’t make any side trips - so we were left with wondering what caused the unique pigmentation that turned the prairie grass orange, and what trace elements caused the different pigmentations in the rock layers that were exposed by the road cuts. Unfortunately, side trips to places like “Cathedral of the Plains” (PlainsCathedral), the World’s Largest Prairie Dog (BigDog) or the Eisenhower Presidential Library (Dusty Papers)were out of the question.
There was one side trip, however, that was absolutely essential - the crowning of the King of Carl’s Travel Trivia… Carl decided that Marv was so far ahead of the game that nobody else could catch up! So we detoured south from Interstate 70 to Ellsworth to visit Marv and present him with his prize “That Book …of Perfectly Useless Information.” Carl had taken a quick look inside and felt that it was suitable… hence Marv’s trivia question of a few days ago!! While we were in Ellsworth we detoured slightly to see the Old Cow Town - in it’s heyday from 1871 to 1875 it was the terminus of the cattle trade in Kansas and was one of the “Wildest of Cowtowns” according to the informational sign.
Today, the downtown area has some silhouette figures strategically placed along Main Street… Maria particularly liked the one of the miner with the bag of gold… just outside the bank!!

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The Great Tumbleweed Encounter

Continuing along the road we were eating up the miles, listening to Sirius Satellite Radio and thinking about where we would stop for the night… We had initially thought about going all the way to Carl’s uncles’ house in Dillon Colorado, but given our late start that was really out of the question… with our timing it was really a toss up between Goodland, Kansas and Limon, Colorado! Just east of Goodland we encountered the low pressure front that had recently dumped inches of snow in the Colorado Rockies, by the time we encountered it all that was left was the wind… and it was really blowing! Carl tried to find out just how hard it was blowing - Weather Underground (WeatherGoodland) reported that the Maximum Wind Speed was 48 mph (77 km/h) with gusts as high as 59 mph (95 km/h). It is hard to relate to just how fast this really is… all Carl knew was that he had to work hard to dodge the tumbleweeds that were dashing across the road in front of the truck - mostly it was one or two, but sometimes a whole family would want to cross together… making dodging them next to impossible! Needless to say we collected a few along the way! While Carl was driving Maria tried valiantly to capture the scenario on film, to no avail - everything was moving way to fast and all she managed to capture were interesting head light patterns. So alas, we don’t have pictures of the stack of tumbleweeds higher than the truck that piled up under the state line bridge, or the mega tumbleweed (higher than the front of the truck) where Carl - unfortunately - scored a direct hit! After dodging tumbleweeds for over 100 miles the wind showed no signs of abating. So when we reached Limon we decided to call it a day, score one for the tumbleweeds!!

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Carl’s Travel Trivia

Yesterday’s Answer: Connecticut’s state nickname is “The Constitution State.”
Today’s Question: If a group of Quail is a Covey, what is a group of tumbleweeds?

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