Showing posts with label KANSAS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label KANSAS. Show all posts

FINAL PREPARATIONS ARE DONE

TUESDAY

TRAVEL DAY
STOP #288

You might be wondering why would we move the trailer 21.7 miles after just a two night visit? Well it's because we were 23 miles from the Ford Dealership and that's outside of their Free Courtesy Shuttle Van limits of service.

By moving across town basically, we are now just 6 miles from the Dealership and can use them to shuttle me back to THE POD after I drop ROVER off for service and then return me to the Dealership when he's all fixed and ready to come home.

I'm not sure what it would have cost me to Uber back and forth (twice) from 22 miles away, but here at the county park there is laundry equipment, something that we are desperately in need of. The bathrooms, showers and laundry are right across the driveway from the site we selected, that should make it convenient to get things done.


Plenty of room to fit into this County Park campsite.


Not such a bad view for being in the middle of the Capitol City of Topeka, KS.

ROVER was returned to us today and he's all ready to transport us and THE POD to Alaska. For the next 12 days we will be traveling 100's of miles each and every day until we take a two day rest stop in northern British Columbia. Our previous plan was to schedule a 2 or 3-day layover every third day, but that's the price we'll have to pay for taking the time now to get ROVER's issues fixed before they become a serious problem!

Because of our accelerated travel plan we won't be blogging at every stop like we usually do. Mainly because there won't be too much to talk about, unless we pass by something interesting on Interstate 29, like that's going to happen. When's the last time you saw something interesting traveling 65MPH down the Interstate?

We will post one more blog just before we cross over the Canadian Border on Tuesday morning, just to let you know we made it that far. After that we will once again go silent for 7-days as we travel northwest across Canada, until we reach the beginning of the historic Alaska Highway in Dawson Creek, British Columbia.

Stay tuned as we travel

ATTENTION: If you just have to know where we are and that we're doing fine I intend to update our location each morning on our 2022 Landings Page. You can SEE where we are by looking at the map on the top of the page and READ where we stayed by checking out the list at the bottom of the page.

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TWO PEAS

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GOOD NEWS FROM TOPEKA (KS)

SUNDAY

TRAVEL DAY
STOP #287

We left Wilson State Park today, a day earlier than expected, because the forecast for tomorrow is once again 25-30PMH winds. Today the winds are a relatively mild 10-15MPH so we took the opportunity to travel 180+ miles east to just outside of Topeka, KS where we have an appointment to have ROVER checked out to have his timing phasers replaced, again!

It was just over a year ago we had this done while in Florida. This is a known issue with this 3.5L EcoBoost engine we have, but I've been assured the NEW phasers they are installing this time don't suffer from the same premature malfunctioning that the old style ones do. It's all covered under warranty, but it's a PIA taking it in for the two day repair that it required to fix it.

This will delay our push to head towards Alaska by several days, but shouldn't change our arrival date in the state. It just takes the leisure out of our planned travels and now we'll have to endure several back to back 400+ mile travel days. Something we've already done once before when the pandemic shut down all the campgrounds back in April of 2020.


MONDAY - I took ROVER into the Laird Noller Ford dealership in Topeka, KS today and got some really good news. After the Service Advisor listened to ROVER's start up rattle he confided in me that he went ahead and ordered the necessary parts based on what I described to him on the phone last week. The really good news is they have already arrived here in Topeka.

What does that means to us? It means we will be back on the road headed north on Saturday, instead of Wednesday next week. That's huge for us, because we can cut back on our daily travel distances for the next few weeks by about 100 miles a day, putting a little bit of the leisure back into our travels.

It also means I'll gladly have to rearrange a few reservations and pay a couple of small fees, but that's just fine with us!

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WILSON STATE PARK (KS) ★★

THURSDAY

TRAVEL DAY
STOP #286

We scheduled a pitstop along our route today and it just so happens to be across the street from the Ford Dealership I was at on Tuesday for our oil change.

It was four months ago today that Tricia and I received our COVID booster shots down in Florida. Today is the first day we are eligible to recieve our second booster shot, so we both walked into Walmart and decided to just "git er dun".

As a reward afterwards, we walked next door to an Old Chicago Pizza + Taproom Restaurant and ate lunch. We've been seeing this restaurant chain everywhere the last few weeks and finally decided to give it a try.

Tricia did get a small personal-sized pizza and I elected to go with their meatball sandwich. Was it good? Let's just say, there were no leftovers to take home.





FRIDAY - What a diffenence a few hours make when it comes to the ever present Kansas winds.

Even as far back as 1939 when they filmed the Wizard of Oz, Kansas was known as a windy place. That's why the setting for Dorothy's house was in Kansas, right?.

Well today it sure did live up to it's reputation. This morning we went into town for breakfast and the winds were of the usual 10-15MPH variety. By 4:30PM we were feeling the winds change and by 5:00PM we were being hit broadside by constant winds above 40PMH. We had several gusts over 50PMH and one that hit a record 54MPH since we moved into THE POD.

We were only halfway into the Tropical Storm Force winds range (39-73MPH), but it sure did "feel like" a hurricane (74+MPH) was brewing outside from "inside THE POD".


It was a relatively calm lake at 10:30AM when we returned from breakfast in town.


Not so calm at 5:15PM during the height of the winds.

UPDATE: Around 6:00PM the winds died down to a mild 15-20MPH range and we thought we were done. Then out of nowhere the winds changed direction and began hitting us from the rear, which bangs the wind meter pole up against the trailer. That won't do, so I went outside to lay the pole on the ground, but just before I did we registered a new record wind gust at 56MPH.

SATURDAY - The town of Wilson, KS is known as the "Czech Capital of Kansas". Beginning in the 1870s Wilson began attracting a large number of Czechoslovakian immigrants.

They pretty much founded the town and still today a large percentage of the population can trace their ancestory back to these early pioneers.

That is why they call themselves the "Czech Capital of Kansas" and erected a 20-foot tall Czech Egg (the largest in the world BTW) on the main street through town. All around town you can find more Czech Eggs but they don't measure up to the big one, they're all only 4-feet tall. We found several of them just driving around the downtown area.

There is one sure-fire way to avoid the winds here in Kansas. I know what all you smart alecks are thinking, "Yeah, leave the state". Well that does work, but we're not through here yet.

What also works is what everyone does when the tornado sirens go off, head underground! Since there are no Show Cave Tours anywhere in the state, we found what I consider to be a rather unique way to work around that.

In 2013 a young married couple purchased a 24-acre parcel just outside of the nearby town of Wilson, KS. They offer a 1-hour tour of their storm cellar. However there is an astonishing story that goes along with their storm cellar, it was built by the US Government in 1959 at a cost of over $12,000,000 (that's over $110,000,000 dollars in today's money) and then just abandoned it five years later in 1964.

Of course they didn't pay anywhere near that much, (they paid $300K) it was an abandoned property after all. Actually, there was nothing left behind above ground when the government moved on. Just a 176-foot deep, 52-foot round underground silo!

Has anyone figured out where I'm going with this story? If you guessed that we were going on a tour of a decommissioned Atlas F Missile Base, you would be correct. Over 70 of these underground Atlas F missle silos exist in the United States, most are privately owned and not open to the public. This one however is!

WILSON (KS) ATTRACTIONS

The World's Largest Czech Egg stands 20-feet tall in downtown Wilson, KS.
Scattered around downtown are a dozen or more smaller 4-foot Czech Eggs.
Everyone is familiar with this version of a Pay Phone...
... but how many places can you find one of these? There were several around town here.
Do you recognize this motley crew?
They were outside of the Kansas Originals Market with this mechanical chicken.
The store only sells Kansas made or Kansas grown products.
It's amazing what lies beneath this 70-foot round and 8-foot deep concrete slab.
No, that's not our entrance into the missile silo, it's actually the emergency escape tunnel.
This is our entrance into the silo.
One of the many interior doors that prevent intrusion from the outside and also prevent the rocket blast from escape during launch.
This is the launch room and that ladder on the ceiling is the bottom of the escape tunnel.
This launch desk is all that was left behind, even though they did strip out all the electronics. Notice the little red box on the left wall.
This is where they secured the launch keys. Two combination padlocked compartments, accessable only by the two missileers on duty, just like in the movies.
Now we take a short passageway, with more blast doors, over to the 176 foot deep missle silo.
Looking up 30-feet in the silo at the bottom of the surface blast doors.
Looking down into the silo at roughly 80 feet of 60-year old water, roughly a million gallons, that was used to satisfy the disarmament agreement with Russia at the end of the Cold War. The water rendered the silo unusable for launching missles, others were filled with sand or even concrete.

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CEDAR BLUFF STATE PARK (KS) ★

MONDAY

TRAVEL DAY
STOP #285

What a boring 180+ mile drive it was today. We saw 100 times more cows than people and cars today, which is not all that unusual in rural Kansas. The last hour of driving was even on a route that is touted as the Smoky Valley Scenic Byway.

The byway is supossed to be wonderful to travel on in the springtime, due to the abundance of roadside wild flowers. Today they must all still be underground waiting for spring to start, because we didn't see any of them.

Cedar Bluff State Park is rated as one of the top state parks in Kansas and I can see why. Not only is the campground well maintained, it is huge and the park completely surrounds the Cedar Bluff Reservoir that was created when they dammed the Smoky Hill River in 1951.

There are two separate campgrounds areas located on the lake with multiple loops and several locations with cabin rentals. It's obvious they also offer seasonal campsites to those residents who wish to have a "summer home" to enjoy on the weekends.

Sadly, like all water locations in the region, the levels are extremely low and have been for quite a few years, as evident in the photos.


When I booked this site it was listed as a 180-foot back in site. I thought, "that can't be right"!
And it wasn't, it's 186 feet because I "very accurately" paced it off myself upon arrival.


You can see on the right where the water "used to be",
along with the boat ramp that leads into the grasses.


But our site is very wide and nearly level, so it'll do nicely.

TUESDAY - When Tricia got up early this morning to do her daily walk I also was up so I could drive the 37.5 miles to the Ford Dealership to get an oil change and make ROVER as travel ready as he can be for the trip to Alaska.

Also while I was gone Tricia began cleaning the dust and dirt from the inside of THE POD that has accumulated while we've been traveling the gravel backroads for the last few weeks. It's been coming in through the floor where there are holes cut to accommadate water lines, solar panel wiring, and propane piping. As well as entereing in the refrigerator vent. The factory caulking has dried, cracked and fallen away from most of these locations.

We've been discussing solutions to help remedy the situation, like spraying in expanding foam insulation. Anyone else have any suggestions?

WEDNESDAY - The winds have finally died down around here so we're going out to see the rest of this huge state park. There are cabins and more campsites on the southern shoreline of the reservoir that we haven't seen yet.

Right away I realized you have to travel 3.5 miles down a gravel road to access these campsites so we weren't terribly interested is booking over here next time we visit. The sites are more rustic and spread out, but that gravel road, no thanks!

There is an overlook site we saw on the campground map that mentions a wonderful view of the reservoir, something that doesn't exist on the lower northern shore where we are camped.


We found it at the end of the road.


That is a wonderful view.

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Until next time

TWO PEAS

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