Kansas

Well, Wichita didn't live up to its name.  It seemed a fairly undistinguished city.  I'm not surprised that it inspired a pretty boring song about a lineman.  On the way to Wichita we called at the museum that charts the westward expansion in Independence, on the outskirts of Kansas City.  It had lots of first hand accounts of the deprivations of the pioneers.

After Wichita we drove to Dodge City.  As someone who grew up in the 1950s with all those Westerns on TV and at the cinema I just had to see the place that Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson tried to keep lawful at the end of the 19th Century!  It's still quite a small place and the middle of it is where the original city was, so we were able to walk around and get the feel of it.  About 10 miles west of Dodge there's a history site that preserves some of the Santa Fe trail that the waggons took moving west and you can still see the ruts that the wheels made.

Overall though, Kansas is very boring to drive through - about 700 miles of completely flat grassland - like a huge slice of Lincolnshire!

The bad news is that my laptop has died on me, so I'm having to write this on the hotel PC.  I won't be able to publish any photos for a while because I can't transfer them from our cameras.  However, I'm thinking of buying a netbook when we get to Colorado because they seem pretty cheap and the sales tax there is very low.  We'll see.

The good news is that the first episode of the 4th series of Madmen starts tonight on AMC TV to-night, so when I get home I'll be able to tell Christopher and Ruth all about it!