Today was one of those ROAD TRIP days, lots of miles with few breaks. In fact we racked up 4 new states and over 630 miles today and only stopped as we were tired. That said as we have all holed up in the Waconda Motel in Beloit Kansas we are beginning to question that decision.
Our plan was always to end up either in Southern Nebraska or Northern Kansas tonight so in some respects we did what we set out to achieve. We started early knowing that we’d be on the road for a while and coincidentally passed our 2,000th mile in the caravan driving past a place called Nevada in Missouri quite early on in the day, I wonder what the final mileage will be when we drop the caravan off (if it makes it that far). Apart from a couple of quick stops to either refuel the car or ourselves (in fact we munched lunch in Mound City MO) we ploughed on through Missouri and into Iowa not even pausing for one of our now infamous tripod moments in front of an obscure place name. We did pass a few and hopefully Rag will have posted those pictures in the road trip section.
Our visit to Iowa was brief, very brief, if we were there for more than 10 minutes I’d be surprised, again no tripod moment, but we’d visited Iowa all the same. It was as we were crossing the border that we first started to see the remnants of snow, and this was also the case as we crossed into Nebraska. In fact the only other real evidence of any “proper” weather was the damage we’d seen to some of the trees in the Ozarks, but we weren’t too sure what had caused those.
As we were making good progress through Nebraska and had no tripod moment planned we decided to plough on into Kansas for our scheduled stops. However before leaving Nebraska we did spot the winner of the billboard for stating the bleeding obvious (hopefully you’ll work out which one I mean from those pictures posted for today). We needed fuel and were beginning to think about places to stay once we got across into Kansas and found a town called Mankato. It had a proper old fashioned cobbled main street and everything. What did concern us slightly was the sign outside of Bob’s bar that said “no guns allowed inside”, but as we’d been downtown in Memphis, a small bar in Kansas was child’s play.
Next stop was a place just outside Lebanon (no not THAT Lebanon) but one in Northern Kansas that boasts to be the geographical centre of mainland USA. For such a location it was surprising that there were no tacky souvenir stands or anyone charging you to be there, but no, all that was there was a small stone monument and an even smaller church (maybe someone has been reading my previous blogs) Time for a quick tripod moment as it was starting to get cold, especially in the wind. This monument was about two mile north of the town of Lebanon which was a good thing as the town itself looked about as ravaged as it’s namesake in the Middle East.
As there was nowhere to stay in Lebanon we did the only thing we could which was head for our next scheduled tripod moment in the town of Cawker City. This town boasts the biggest ball of twine record. Now if you were to believe the Weird Al song (look it up on You Tube), this is in Minnesota, but apparently the Minnesota twine ball is the largest created by one person, this one in Cawker was started by one person trying to break the record, but when he died he was so close the townsfolk decided to continue his work and have an annual event where they add further twine. Again, blink and you’d have missed it, this time there was a tacky souvenir shop but it was across the road and closed, but the ball itself was free to view, result.
Again nowhere to stay in Cawker so we took a quick look at the map and plumped for Salina as it looked pretty big, problem was that it was 50 miles away in the wrong direction from our next stop and we’d been on the road for 11 hours at this point but we had no choice. That was until we hit the next town, Beloit, we’d seen a billboard for a Motel 8 (one of the many cheap chain motels) but as we entered the town we spotted an independent motel, the Waconda. It looked ok from the outside but before going in we took a quick scoot up the main street to try and find a bar and somewhere to eat. We found eateries but a bar was less forthcoming but by this stage we were so tired we didn’t care.
When the guys went to check in they asked the guy if there was a bar in the town he said yes but when his wife came to the desk she didn’t think there was so we left them arguing as we went to find our rooms. Interesting is the best word I could use, bloody awful are two more, but by this stage it was blowing a gale and we just wanted to get out of the wind. However we still needed to find food and beer so we ventured out to the local supermarket whilst trying not to get blown off our feet only to find it didn’t sell beer, so found a garage that did (over priced of course). Next was food and we ended up at Sonic burger. If you’ve never been it’s like the restaurant in the opening titles of the Flintstones, a bit like a drive through except you park. I.e. you park in your bay, order through a microphone, swipe your card to pay and then they bring it out to your car for you (admittedly not on roller skates, but it was a good job in this weather or they may have been blown back into Nebraska). We decided to eat back in the motel so we skulked back and ate a god awful burger whilst all looking miserably at each other. An early night was on the cards, but with an early start also (weather permitting) as we don’t want to stay here any longer than we have to. Another lesson to learn.
Tomorrow may bring two more states or pneumonia if I can’t get this room to warm up any more. It may also bring further car issues as it is now saying it needs an oil change, it can beep all it likes, I’m not paying for it.
