Day 11: Backtrack, backtrack...

June 01, 2019

We shot out of Salida at 6:50 AM, to 46 degrees, saluting the sun a bit as it rose low over the eastern hills - something it would do dozens of times as the canyon walls rose and fell around us.  It was a beautiful way to say goodbye to the mountains, with the Arkansas River's pools and rifflings below.

We came spilling out of the canyon at the alluvial fan of Parkland, still early in the day but thousands of years too late to see it formed.  Signs for Royal Gorge were along the roadside, but that's a ride Sue and I don't want to take again any time soon.

We buzzed through Canon City, shops still closed, grass growing up through the cracks in the parking lot at Sears, and then by 8 AM we were on the prairie proper, leaving behind the beautiful smells of sage and mesquite and settling in for triple digits.

Today was a day for backtracking due to severe weather developing northwest and southeast, the humidity forming throughout the day hot and heavy on the ground and obscuring the mountains behind and the windmills to the sides - moisture that will probably become the severe weather two days from now.  We formed a 520-mile letter "J" as we headed southeast and then straight north.  We rode through Kit Carson and Cheyenne Wells, the roadside lined with farm equipment and drilling supplies for the little pumps that bob amidst the crops.

The road along eastern Colorado and western Kansas follows an old railroad line with a familiar sight.  Like wooden soldiers from childhood memory, marching along the railroad tracks are thousands of low-standing telegraph poles,  cross-arms tilted crazily, with hundreds of blue glass insulators and a strand or two of wire clinging to the past.  On the other side of the road, a hundred yards and a hundred years away stands the modern version - wooden poles, taller now for their power lines with a single strand of fiber carrying enough data to fill multiple Libraries of Congress per second.  Ahead, above the town, the cell tower that will replace them all transmits baby photos and wedding videos, providing emotional connections without the need for physical ones.

We arrived back in Kearney, Nebraska, most of the hotels full of Shriners, baseball players and car show afficionados, but managed to score a room.  The rest of the trip was flat and long, the only thing of note being that we achieved a new level on the Buffet Scale - pig trucks rank a "12", their double-deckered, corrugated and hole-punched sides creating an air tsunami that hits you in the back of the helmet like a baseball bat - an Easton Pig Stick, perhaps.  And they all travel stupid miles per hour, fearing their paid-by-the-pound cargo will go to the bathroom on the way to market if they take too long.

That's all for today, intrepid followers.  Tomorrow is another glorious day.  Onward and upward!