From Dodge City to Emporia (Friday)

Today is a travel day, we are done in Dodge City.  We didn't have any snow this morning and the winds were fairly calm until about 11:00 a.m., temperature was 35 at 6:30 but it made it into the 50s during the day.  As we slid the slides in, the ice slid off the top of the slides.  Then we were good to go. 

Our intent is to make it to Emporia today.  We got on the road at 9:20.  We haven't done much winter RV camping, and at this campground in Dodge City, since they were expecting the temperature to drop below freezing, they came around at night and unhooked everyone's water, locked their water faucets down, and then came back around the next morning when it got above freezing and unlooked the faucets.  We didn't hook up to water here so it didn't affect us, but I did see the owner/host/whatever he was, come around and turn everyone's water back on.

We took the scenic route across Hwy 50, which took us past lots and lots of wheat fields, most of them waving green at us.  Some of these farmers are fortunate, they are able to hedge their farming risk by an oil well right in their wheat field.  (Remember you can click on the picture to make it bigger so you can see it better).  There seemed to be a little more moisture on this side of Kansas, but we also saw lots of irrigation pipe.  Joe saw one of those outside of Dodge that had 10 sections, and Joe thought each section was probably 100 ft, so that would be 1000 ft they could irrigate with one of these pivot systems.  We saw one field that was even a little hilly, and Joe was surprised it could navigate that kind of terrain.

Every little town had grain elevators, some more than one, always along the railroad tracks.  And these towns were about 8-10 miles apart.  We came through a pretty good-sized windmill farm, and with the wind we have endured here it seemed like a no-brainer.  They should have more of these!

Our wildlife today consisted of 4 baby red foxes playing in and out of their den which happened to be right alongside the highway.  And we saw one wild turkey.  I was really sorry I missed getting a picture of the foxes because they were close and I saw them early, but I couldn't figure out what they were.  We first thought they were cats.

We thought we might make it further than Emporia because we were rolling along pretty good, but then the winds kicked up just before noon, and it became a battle again.  We reached Emporia about 2:45, fueled, then found a place to buy propane (which took forever because some idiot parked next to the propane tank and walked inside the gas station and apparently disappeared for a while.  So those two stops took an hour!  We ended up on a Walmart parking lot for the night.  We had driven past an RV campground just out of town, but we really didn't need any hookups so we went cheap.  We drove 229 miles today.  Gas was $3.399 here, but propane was $3.09 (we had seen it in Chino Valley for $1.55).