Day 4

We started Day 4 in Hesston, Kansas. I realized quickly that maybe it’s the comforting smell of prairie and cottonwoods, but I like Kansas.

Hello, my name is Sarah…and I actually like Kansas.

I don’t know how to feel about that.

We passed a few cool things before I went back to being ready to get out of Kansas. One was Running Turkey Creek. I’m loving the fun creek names we’re seeing on this trip. People have some serious creativity (or maybe not) with creek names. We also saw a cool stone arch in the middle of someone’s field. There was a little hill (butte?), and a random stone archway. That was odd enough. But not too many yards away from it (twenty? Who knows…) there was a cross. It was really interesting and I can’t help but wonder why it was there and wish I knew.

We stopped at a grocery store called Dillons, which was funny because it was the exact same as a Kroger, just with a different name. The people there let us look at their smart phones to see the radar, which was nice since we’ve been internet-less and there was some serious tornado activity in the plains over the weekend, in case you missed that. It was really windy (REALLY windy) in this part of Kansas and the clouds were dark. IT was also raining. The people in the store told us that “the weathermen said it wasn’t supposed to do this here today!” and honestly the sound of their voices made it sound like there was more than rain coming. Of course, the grocery store had a designated tornado shelter area in the back, so I felt slightly better. That’s the thing about Kansas. They have shelters. Tornados in Georgia aren’t as big usually, but we can’t see them coming and hardly anyone has a shelter.

Tornados. Ick.

Anyway, we finally drove out of the bad weather, though we could see it in the distance. I used to dislike seeing the weather from so far away, but actually it was kind of fun this time. I really didn’t mind. The bad stuff stayed to the east of us, but we really didn’t miss it by much. I’m thankful God kept us safe and kept us out of it, especially since I don’t know how we would have known to take shelter unless we’d actually seen a tornado coming towards us.

Nebraska, interestingly enough, wasn’t as pretty as we remembered from the last trip. It was okay, and Valentino’s Pizza at the gas station we stopped at was amazing. Western Nebraska is way more western than I usually picture it as, so that was fun. It was 91 when we stopped at dinner time, so we got a hotel so my parents wouldn’t have to sleep in the hot tent.

It went down to 50 something overnight. Ooops. Guess we could have camped. But I didn’t really mind the nice hotel. Dinner was Nebraska steak. Yum.