Friday to Kansas

We left Palo Duro Canyon State Park at about 9:30am on Friday morning with the plan to head to Kansas so Miss Doozie could "collect" another state.

After we got through Amarillo, the land was full of valleys/crevasses and looked like it would only be viable for grazing (and not all that good for grazing either), but a bit further north, we came into land that was mixed use - some crop fields, some cattle raising. The still pictures doesn't convey the beauty, but the grasses were blowing and swaying so beautifully in the wind - and it was WINDY! Almost straight out of the west - when we got onto US 54 which went northeast for a while, it was great! But most of the time we were dealing with a cross wind when we were in Texas and Oklahoma - until we got to Kansas, and almost magically, the wind stopped!

I took this picture to show an odd looking way that the land is cut through on each side of the road in Kansas - we were driving up Kansas-27. There are crop fields or pasture land on both sides of the road. We would be accustomed to seeing something like this when the road is cut through rock, but those banks are dirt, or that's what they appear to be. Why isn't something growing on them? And why aren't they graded down?

Coming up on another set of those dirt "cliffs" on the side of the road.

 While Dwayne was driving, I was looking for an "interesting" place to stop for the night. We had a Walmart in Goodland, KS picked out as our planned stop, but I was looking at various sources, and I found another dry lake bed that indicated that camping was allowed around it. Since we had liked the place we stopped in Texas (Buffalo Lake NWR - http://trekincartwrights.blogspot.com/2018/06/back-to-texas-for-few-days.html), we were interested in visiting another dry lake!

The information we had indicated that the route was on gravel roads, but that they were in good shape and ok to drive on.

We eventually found the park - and we're the only ones here! There really aren't any places that are marked as parking for RVs, but there are picnic tables with trash cans located around the dry lake. It is nicely maintained, mowed, driveway in good shape. The information from one of our RVing sources indicated that you could park anywhere, just pull off on the grass.

We decided to walk further down the driveway to determine whether we could get out by continuing to drive on the driveway or whether we would ultimately need to unhook the Jeep to get turned around. I turned around to take a picture of Miss Doozie and the Jeep back there parked in the shade.

It was a pleasant walk, some of it in nice shade (though the Mayflies or Deerflies were pretty bad when we were in the shade).

There's a boat ramp down to where the lake used to be. There is also a driveway on the other side of the lake and picnic tables on that side too.

Looking down the lake bed. There is a nice playground there too. It is really out away from any town - I'm not sure who makes use of this.

I think the sign-maker hasn't noticed that there is no water in the lake...

We walked a big loop so this was returning to where Miss Doozie was parked - she is in the middle of the picture under the trees down there!

The weather report indicated that we would have rain, and we did after the sun went down (and small hail too). The clouds were very threatening and we could see lightning in them, but still a beautiful sunset!

If you look over to the right side of this blog post, you will see that Miss Doozie's states visited map has been updated and now includes Kansas! Just Nebraska, Colorado, Utah, and Michigan remain of the 48 contiguous states.