Kansas Trek

Day 1 — 13 April 2017

Vance and I (Marc) got on the road at 8:00 in Vance’s 2009 Porsche 911. The speedometer goes up to 200 mph (but it will only do 180).

 

We started out on US 40 from Albuquerque but took a detour onto Route 66 to see (hear) The Singing Highway. 

This is an amazing stretch of road where grooves have been cut into the asphalt. When you drive over them at 45 mph, your tires play a snatch of “America the Beautiful.” This was created by National Geographic magazine. Why don’t they do this everywhere?

We rejoined I-40 at Moriarty (we had to) and made our first pit stop at Clines Corners, a tourist trap of the highest order.

I took over driving at Santa Rosa.

 We stopped at Nara Visa to snap some cool old buildings and an ancient drill press sitting on the sidewalk.

Soon after, we left New Mexico and headed into the Texas panhandle.

  

We got to Dalhart, Texas, in time for lunch, so went to Hodie’s Barbecue, where everyone seemed to know everyone else. We then photographed our first grain elevator, which was just a few blocks away. We spoke to a woman in the office, who gave us permission to take photos. She also told us that the wooden structure was unsafe and hadn’t been used for 30 years. It was locked and no one was admitted. It was right next door to newer concrete elevators, of which there are many in Dalhart (and everywhere along the road).

 

Guymon, Oklahoma, our next stop, has an old downtown but much of the architecture has been defaced by “modernization.” However, the American Theater was still mostly intact, with its beautiful enameled-steel sign. Although not a movie house any more, it’s still a playhouse, now showing “Guys and Dolls.” In Guymon we found our second elevator near the railroad. The land here is completely flat with a lot of wind generators and some oil wells.

There were some amazing cloud formations northeast of Guymon — super cell? Obviously a severe storm up ahead.

Hooker, Oklahoma, just up Highway 54 from Guymon, provided our third elevator. This was a tiny one that Vance had feared torn down. We couldn’t find it on our initial search but, on the way out of town, Vance spied it. It was a cutie.

 We were chasing the storm and finally caught up with it at the Kansas State line. The rain was torrential. The sky was black out the right-hand side of the car but vivid blue sky, light fluffy clouds, and sunshine out the left. Bizarre. By the time we got to Liberal the storm had almost completely abated, having moved off to the east, leaving behind a beautiful rainbow.

 North of Liberal we came across a wonderful old steel deck-truss bridge, which we stopped to photograph, the sun having returned.

Up the road in Kismet we found our fourth vanishing icon of the American prairie. It’s been a good day.

 We made a brief stop in Plains, home of the widest main street in the US. There we found an old GP road switcher owned by Archer Daniels Midland.

 Fowler’s grain elevator (#5) was attached to a more modern facility owned by the Ashland Feed & Grain.

  
The very best one of the day, however, was a tiny structure with an unusual barn-type roof (#6), several miles northeast of Minneola. We had to travel maybe a mile or more on dirt roads to get to it. It is in a field by itself, surrounded by fields, without another structure in sight and not a soul for miles. In the setting sun it was magical.

But wait, there’s more. As we passed a place called Kingsdown, Vance spied another tiny elevator (#7). We found it (again on dirt roads) but it was clearly on private property, so we couldn’t get too close.

 By then it was getting dark, so we drove on to Greensburg, where we had dinner at Pueblo Nuevo and checked into our hotel, tired but happy.