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We started our day at the local Waffle House, the same place we had dinner last night. I love the character of these little places - you always find interesting people there.
We continued driving west on Interstate 70 until we got to Kansas City. From there we headed southwest on Rt. 35 towards Hutchinson.
Missouri seems like a nice state. The speed limit is 70 mph; the scenery has lots of rolling hills and rock formations; there are fireworks factories everywhere!! We stopped at a Black Cat fireworks factory and I just salivated at all the various forms of fireworks. If we were stopping in Missouri on the way home I might have felt the need to stockpile my arsenal.
The Monarch butterflies seem to be migrating south for the winter. We saw many of them -- quite a few of them "up close and personal" on our windshield.
While driving through Kansas City, I noticed the Sprint logo on a building off to the side. I realized the Kansas City is the headquarters for Sprint. I also thought about the fact that I had been unable to connect to the internet at the Motel 6 last night. I knew that Sprint was coming out with an attachment that allows you to hook up your Sprint PCS phone as a modem on your laptop and make connections to the internet. That attachment had been unavailable in Maryland when we left but I thought that the attachment might be in stock in Sprint's home area.
We stopped off at the Sprint building and asked directions to the local Sprint PCS store. We quickly found the store and the attachment. Yes! With a little bit of tweaking it worked like a charm, although it's quite slow (14,400 baud).
We also found the southern area of Kansas City, Kansas to be extremely affluent. There's a building boom there that makes Tysons Corner, Virginia look like a slouch.
The drive from Kansas City to Hesston was quite windy. The conversion van catches all the wind and it was tough holding the van on the road. I tried to use the computer in the back of the van but the wind was so strong that I couldn't keep my fingers on the correct keys. The van just kept swaying right and then left. We also saw something new to us - train cars stacked two containers high. All of the overpasses in Kansas are high enough to accommodate these double-high trains.
We stopped in Newton so Ann could revisit an old college hangout - Druber's Doughnuts. Newton is an old town and Druber's turned out to be a hole in the wall. It was closed. Apparently, when Ann went to Hesston College, there were few other places around where a college student could get coffee and a doughnut in the middle of the night so they would go to Druber's and study. Druber's opens up 11 p.m. to start making doughnuts for the next day.
Next we drove to Hesston where Ann went to school. Hesston is a tiny town and the school is also small but Ann remarked about how much the campus has changed since she went to school there.
Finally, we drove to Dan and Shelly Kauffman's home just east of Hutchinson. Ann and Shelly met at Hesston nineteen years ago. Dan and Shelly live between a couple of those huge Kansas farms. We had to take a dirt road about 3 miles to find their home. We arrived about 7:00 p.m. We had an enjoyable evening with Dan, Shelly, and their three children, Kayla, Keri, and Jeff.
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