Saturday, 5-24-97

We got up early this morning to make preparations the head for California. The thunderstorms we were supposed to get during the night never materialized. They slid around our area. During the night I heard a sound that reminded me of my childhood. I’ve heard the sound several times since we've been here. It was the sound of a wind tunnel in operation or big jet engines being tested out at the Boeing aircraft factory or the McConnell Air Force base. It doesn’t matter where you live in Wichita; you usually can here the roar.

Our departure was the earliest in recent memory. We were on our way out of town by 10AM. Before we were able to get on the road, I filled the motorhome’s water tank and topped off the gas tank. Then we stopped by the store to take on supplies for the trip. The last thing I did was empty the holding tanks. Then away we went.

I pointed the motorhome north on highway I-135 toward Salina, Kansas for our first leg of the trip. From there we headed west on highway I-70. We stopped at a rest stop outside Russell, Kansas for lunch. While at the rest stop, I took a few pictures of nearby stone fence posts. Because of a shortage of trees many years ago, it was common to cut fence posts from a stone quarry. After leaving the rest stop, we drove by Russell, Kansas. We saw two signs. One was a big billboard that proclaimed "Russell, Kansas ... The Home of Bob Dole" The other sign was made of stone and reads "Russell, Kansas ... Post Rock Country."

Barbed wire fence with stone posts

The northwest area of Kansas is known as: "Post Rock Country." When I saw a billboard with that statement on it, I thought the statement referred to a radio station that played rock and roll music at one time but was now playing country music. The only problem, I didn’t see any call sign or station frequency on the sign. As we drove on, I saw a sign at each town with the town’s name and the statement: "Post Rock Country." It seems to me a better way to arrange the words in the statement would be "Rock Post Country" or "Stone Post Country." The stone posts are still very common around the farm fields of the area.

We proceeded into Colorado where we saw beautiful cloud formations along with some dark clouds as well. The darkest formation was along the Colorado Kansas border, just to the south of us. I turned the weather radio on and found out that very formation had a tornado on the ground on its south side. We felt safe enough because the twister was about 30 or 40 miles from us. The weather radio said we would be experiencing scattered thunderstorms for the remainder of the afternoon. The U.S. weather service was correct on that one. We were lucky for the most part. The highway seemed to wind its way between all the dark clouds. We did get rained on a couple of times. It was exciting to see the lightning flashing all around us. It was great! Then came the dreaded HAIL. The motorhome was pelted good. I wanted to shelter the motorhome under an overpass but they were all taken.

A mean looking storm in Colorado

Fortunately, the hail stones never got bigger than a 1/2 inch in diameter, but they made a splat on the windshield about three inches across. Immediately after the splat, a fog (shaped like the impact area) formed on the inside of the windshield. As the windshield wiper removed the slush, the fog pattern would vanish. It almost looked like a strange computer screen saver. It was quite a show to see and it certainly was exciting.

The rest of the afternoon and evening we saw beautiful cloud formations all around us. I used most of a roll of film trying to capture the images of the clouds.

We made good time and arrived at the KOA near Fort Collins, Colorado shortly before sunset. After I registered for a campsite, I walked out of the office and I was hit by the smell of a thousand outhouses. It turned out there was a feed lot on the other side of the hill behind the campground. I went back into the office and asked for a refund. We then went on our way to find another KOA back in the mountains behind Fort Collins. It was about 25 miles away from our planned route, but we needed a place to stay. Night had fallen by the time we found the KOA. We could see an occasional flash of lightning in the clouds located on the other side of the mountain next to the campground. It was time to get some sleep.