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On the Road - Days 5 and 6

Monday morning we woke up at Debbie's house, rather late, as it was rather late the night before when we all finally got to sleep. Early to bed and early to rise was not going to be the rule to live by while visiting Deb. By about noon, we'd all managed, in a rather leisurely sort of way, to get showered and dressed and ready to head out and find some breakfast and some scenery.

After breakfast, we drove to Garden of the Gods, which I thought was going to be a garden, but turned out to be a place with really neat rock formations. We managed to arrive just as a guided tour of the park was starting, so we got to hear some of the history and geological information about the site.

I was really glad we got to hear the tour, because it matched well with what we'd heard at the National Dinosaur Monument about how the rock structures were created -- just like the sandbar full of bones was pushed up, the rocks that were standing in the Garden of the Gods started out as sandbars (sans dinosuar bones, this time) and were pushed up to stand straight up.

Abby was slightly less impressed with the tour, which contained a lot of information about the plants that were growing there, but she liked climbing into the crevices in the rocks.

We ended up doing everything very slowly and leisurely for the rest of the day, with dinner at eight, and then we started a movie around eleven. I thought the girls would drop off during the movie, but that didn't happen, so we all went to bed around one. I did manage to get our laundry done -- four loads, after only four days! I wasn't quite sure how that happened.

Tuesday morning I woke up and started getting the car loaded up. Around eight, I made the girls get out of bed and onto the couches so that I could break down their air mattresses and pack up their sleeping bags in the space bags. We left Deb's at around nine, but then went and got donuts for breakfast, and ice and drinks for the cooler, then sort of took the very long route to the freeway, so we weren't actually leaving Colorado Springs until almost ten.

While doing research for the trip, I found a place that sounded like a neat little stop between Colorado and Kansas. The town was Burlington, CO, and its attraction was a 100-year -old carousel that had been restored and ran daily in the summertime. So we arrived at noon and found that it wasn't open until one. I was ready to throw in the towel, but the girls thought we should go have lunch and then come back so that they could ride on it. (And lunch was at Sonic, at last! It was really good.)

We had lunch, and then the girls played for a while at the nifty playground at the city park near the carousel, and then they had a ride. The carousel was amazing. It had very neat carved wooden animals with all sorts of details -- like the snake around the giraffe's neck, and the monkey on its tail, and it played organ music as it ran. By then, though, it was already 1:30, and we had places to be!

Unfortunately, I'd forgotten about the time zone change, and while I thought I might be able to make it to Topeka by 6pm, when I lost an hour as we crossed from mountain to central time, there was no chance at all. We made one stop for coffee and one stop for gas in between the Kansas-Colorado border, and arrived in Topeka at cousin Mary's house at about 7:30 central time.

The girls scarfed down dinner then stayed in the pool for the rest of the evening. It's pretty difficult to convince them that anything else is better than swimming. I met a whole lot of cousins, and had a very nice time, although I'm hoping there's not a quiz on names, as I'm afraid I would fail miserably.

Today we passed the 2000 miles driven mark. The girls seem to be holding up well with the driving. The DVD player helps a lot, and today I let Abby use my makeup bag to do whatever she wished with herself, and that was good for more than an hour of entertainment. They played gameboy games through most of Colorado, but seem to be ready for a bit of a break from that now. We now have one easy day, one medium day, and one long day of driving left before we're on the east coast!

The scenery in Kansas is nice, in a gentle sort of way. It's lots of fields and water towers, with the occasional oil pump working away on the edge of a field. The thing that strikes me the most is the billboards and other advertisements on the side of the road. We saw advertisements for a (live!) six-legged steer and the world's largest prairie dog today, as well as boards for a ton of other stuff. The towns seem to be pretty evenly spaced, as well, which is a huge difference from northwestern Colorado, where the towns were very random, and there were no billboards at all, although lots of oil pumps.

With all the driving time, you'd think I'd have a lot of time to think about things and figure things out, but that's not always the case. I saw the first Sinclair gas station in eastern Oregon, and noticed it had a little dinosuar logo, then wondered why it had a dinosaur logo. I think I was in Colorado by the time I figured out that duh, it's fossil fuel.

The different gas stations is one thing I've noticed as we've been driving. We've gone from Shell and Chevron and Texaco to Conoco and Sinclair and Route 66. I had always assumed that gas stations were all nationwide chains, and never considered that they might be regional instead.

Tomorrow we're going to another cousin's house, and will stop in Independence, MO on the way there to see the beginning of the Oregon Trail. I sort of feel like we should have gone to Oregon City, OR on this trip as well, for the official end of the trail, but that will have to wait for another day.

Posted by Rachel at June 29, 2004 11:01 PM