June 8 - United States: Hays, Kansas

Finally, another guest appearance by Jon!

So, I'm finally writing another journal entry!  It's not like we did anything particularly interesting today but I guess I just feel like after driving 500 miles or so I need some sort of creative outlet.

We woke up around 7am and went about taking the tent down.  We've pretty much got the whole operation, including packing the car, down to a science.  It's not that packing things up is difficult, it's just that the roof rack (aptly named "the coffin" by my sister before I left DC) is packed so full that it takes at least 10 minutes of work for the two of us to get the coffin to close and lock.

With the car packed we headed into Estes Park for breakfast at Ed's Cantina then went to see the Stanley Hotel.

The Stanley Hotel--REDRUM...REDRUM!

Does the Stanley Hotel look familiar?  It has a rather storied history and was built about a century ago (I'll spare you, the reader, the tedious history).  The interesting part of the hotel's history is that this is where Stephen King stayed when he wrote The Shining.  Walking around the hotel you can definitely see where King's inspiration came from - it must have been so easy for him to write the book that it practically wrote itself.  Anyway, Stanley Kubrick directed the movie and decided to use another hotel in the movie instead of the Stanley but King got his way when a TV version of The Shining was filmed for ABC in 1997 and the Stanley was used as the hotel in the movie.  And for those of you that are fans of the excellent (my opinion!) movie Dumb and Dumber, with Jim Carey and Jeff Daniels, the Stanley was also used as a location for this movie.  How's that for a few stories on the hotel?

After leaving the Stanley we took the scenic route back to Boulder where we were planning on having lunch.  Heidi checked out Lonely Planet and found a nice sounding Asian place then worked out directions with the huge Colorado map we got from one the National Park information centers.  We wound around Boulder and eventually were on the right road when I said to Heidi, "This must be the first time that Lonely Planet's sent us out of town for a restaurant".  We quickly figured out that I needed to turn around but then the road ended as it wound through a mall parking lot.  We found Walnut St. again and then it ended again...it did this once more and we still looked to be at least 5 blocks away!  Heidi found an Illegal Pete's in a nice pedestrian mall area in downtown Boulder and I happily parked the car, eager to bail out on the Asian place.

Our after lunch entertainment:  a street performer

After lunch we decided to walk off a bit of the burritos we had eaten and came across a street performer doing his show.  By NY standards he was alright but he would have a few things to learn if he wanted to compete in the City!  I mean, yeah, we have high standards for our street performers, you know?  We've seen some great shows in Washington Square and most anything else pales.  Anyway, this guy was fun.  For his finale he actually threw a regular playing card from where he was standing up to the roof of the building across the street and to his right.  Have you ever tried to throw a playing card across the room?  Now try getting it to go two stories high and at least 75 feet away!

After the show broke up we realized that we really needed to get going since it was after 1pm and we had driven less than 100 of the close to 500 miles we hoped to cover today! 

I didn't know that the rest of Colorado, east of Denver, was totally flat!

After getting gas in Denver we finally headed east.  After Denver the landscape quickly became flat with lots of farming going on.  Hundreds of miles passed and still it was just flat and brown.  Sometimes we saw a bit of wheat growing or maybe some recently cleared fields or if we were lucky we saw cattle grazing!  Fun.   

An ocean of wheat waving in the wind

Once in Kansas we passed through Goodland, Kansas.  We must finally be getting to some of those boring places in the US where the town decides that they have nothing to entice travelers to stop so they build something to get people to get off the highway.  Apparently Goodland, KS decided to build a 50 foot high artists' easel with a giant painting of Van Gogh's Sunflowers on the easel.  There weren't any signs or anything letting us know that this would be in town if we got off of the highway but there it was...unfortunately we didn't get a picture but it was pretty odd looking in a small town set in the middle of fields of wheat.  It took us quite a while but we did finally figure out that Kansas' other main crop is sunflowers, and suddenly the giant easel with the painting made sense...as much as a giant easel with a famous painting beside the highway can make sense, that is.

We also passed a sign that proudly boasted that it was "Nebraska's #1 Attraction:  the Pioneer Village".  We passed this one up too but did think of our friend Vinny that also lives in New York and went to school at the University of Nebraska.  I'm hoping that by writing this down we'll actually remember to give him a hard time for Nebraska's having such a pathetic "#1 Attraction".  

Sunset over Hays, KS

We finally got to our goal for the night, Hays, KS and decided to look for a hotel.  Well, wouldn't you know it, the Kansas State High School Track championships are in town this weekend and nearly everything was booked!  We managed to find something and called it a night.  Sadly we missed Game 2 of the NBA Finals last night...I was really hoping that was on tonight.  Oh well...