We had plans to see the Colorado Rockies play the Los Angeles Dodgers in Denver and then on to see the Great Sand Dunes National Park after traversing Kansas. Both planned stops were big things, but they were many miles away. There was no way to cover the ground from St. Louis to Denver in one day by road without stopping during daylight hours with three young children in the back seat. After a successful stop at the Gateway Arch, we had no plans along the route, other than to find a place to sleep in Kansas, possibly at a state park. Some additional planning would be in order. An adventure is not really much fun if all you do is drive. A major goal of a six-year-old adventure is to be fun and exciting. It will not be memorable to a child, in any favorable way, if all you do is point out the road signs that say Welcome to Kansas (with the motto in Latin “Ad Astra per Aspera,” which using my two years Latin study from nearly 50 years ago translates as, “to the Stars through ???” to be honest, I don’t remember the word Aspera) or Welcome to Colorful Colorado (which needs no translation). Although, I do think children get some joy out of entering a state for the first time, and it can be motivating later when it’s time for a lesson in American geography.
After driving through Kansas City, we stopped in Salinas, Kansas, for dinner, after which we started to plan on the go. Camping at a state park was no longer an attractive option. It was getting late, we did not have a campground reservation, and most importantly it was still pretty hot. Earlier, while still in Missouri, I had checked the rates on my app for a room in the town of Hays, Kansas. I saw rates no lower than $298; which is higher than I would normally pay for a room on a six-year-old adventure. About an hour after dinner at the smaller town of Russell (about 30 miles east of Hays) only minutes before pulling into the motel I made a reservation on Booking.com, choosing a place that had a pretty high rating and at what I thought was a good rate. Upon entering the lobby of the Lodge at Russell, a young lady cheerfully said, “Hello, I will be with you in one minute.” As soon as she was free, I said I just made a reservation for the night and she replied, “That can’t be. We are fully booked.” She then looked on her computer and said, “I see you here, but that is for next week.” I was pretty sure I had checked the date before confirming. She said that she would cancel the reservation and was confident that I wouldn’t get billed. She said, “Out of curiosity, what rate did they quote?” I said, $58. She said, “ If we had rooms, I would have only charged 50 bucks.” She apologized for the situation and made a phone call to a nearby hotel. It was a little more than $50, but they did have a room for us. The next morning, the app on my phone pinged and asked me to rate the Lodge at Russell which I had booked through Booking.com. To be clear, we did not stay there, and I hope I don’t get a charge on my credit card.
Now to the reason for choosing the title of this post. Some people probably don’t like the word Bigness. They might prefer the word enormity, immensity, or maybe even magnitude. I think bigness is the right word in this case. It transferred from my brain to my mouth and was uttered as we crossed the western part of Kansas, and further discussed as we traveled through Colorado on our westward-bound leg of the road trip. It came to mind as we were traveling in my son’s double-cab Chevy Silverado with the twins and their older sister packed into their car seats behind us. I think it came to mind because I had recently traveled by jet plane (in the cheap seats) across an ocean where there is not much to see from that perspective. I was hoping that the road trip would impress upon my grandchildren the scale of the United States. Being a Virginian, it struck me that Kansas is different because of its bigness; a word that might translate easily to the mind of a six-year-old on their adventure now that they had seen it with their own eyes through the window of their father’s truck.
After a good nights sleep, we got up early heading west toward Denver for the ballgame. We made a gas stop in the small town of Oakley, named after Annie, the woman famous for her sharpshooting, and a star of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show of old. There were signs from the interstate that directed us to The Fick Fossil and History Museum, a free museum which looked like it might be interesting. It was. It was also complete with very welcoming folks. Upon exiting the museum, a woman at the desk gave each child a fossil shark tooth as a gift (a big bonus to a six-year-old adventurer). Outside was a playground which still had a few old fashioned things including a seesaw. Obviously, the twins were not familiar with it but with a little instruction they mastered it. Unfortunately, they soon realized that if they jumped off while on the low side, it caused their sibling to plummet to the ground. No one got hurt, but it may have caused some hurt feelings. I think they still appreciated the playground stop. Just a few blocks away, we pulled into the parking lot of the Buffalo Bill Cultural Center, where we met more welcoming and knowledgeable folks.
We made one more stop in Kansas; the Prairie Museum in Colby, the next town west off the interstate. The kids danced on a stage set up in the old hayloft of a barn that was advertised as the largest wooden barn in the state. They pretended they were students and teachers in a one room schoolhouse. They visited a prairie house made from sod.
I think it was one of those three places in western Kansas, where in conversation I learned that one of the folks had formed an opinion about Virginia and its natural beauty after living there for a short while. She was awed by the greenness of my home state. She then said she started to miss Kansas because she longed for the ability to see things from a distance. She said a person could see a tornado coming from a long way away because there were not so many trees in the way as there were in Virginia. The trees made her feel a little claustrophobic and she had to move back home. That may illustrate the draw of the bigness of the west for some. I have to admit that while she was saying that I was thinking I was glad we don’t have as many tornadoes in Virginia to look out for and my mind wandered to the classic movie The Wizard of Oz. I knew I was only a few hours away from saying Dorothy’s line: “We aren’t in Kansas anymore.”
That said, talking to the people I met confirmed that I will need to return to Kansas again. I still have not seen the Capitol in Topeka, and there are some wildlife refuges that I would like to visit. By no means can I say I have seen all of Kansas.
I did not take many photos of Kansas on this trip other than those of grandchildren enjoying themselves. The same is true of Denver and the baseball game. I encouraged my son to put Great Sand Dunes National Park on the plans for the road trip, even though I had been to the park twice before. I thought the kids would enjoy what the park had to offer and I believe they did. The photo above was taken at Great Sand Dunes National Park. The Park was where the kids learned about the Junior Ranger Program that the National Park Service offers to educate young visitors. This was the first time I camped at Zapata Falls just outside the park on Bureau of Land Management property. It was the first camping trip that we did on this adventure. It was also the first time I tried to hike up the dunes, which was much harder than expected. As we approached the dunes, I asked the grandchildren which was taller; the Gateway Arch or the highest of the Great Sand Dunes. They all laughed and thought it was a silly question, but they guessed wrong. Although they are both about the same height, the Dunes are slightly taller.
The photos I took on this part of the adventure you can see by clicking here.