Dodge City to Great Bend, Kansas

88 miles, 4:00 hours, 496 feet of climbing, 5,160 Calories.

I was going to start with, "Let's get the h*ll out of Dodge…", but I think, "America the Beautiful," is more apt.

"O beautiful, for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,…"

Weather Underground had forecast a "favorable" wind. Maybe there's something to sprinkling the sand from Manhattan Beach on the State Line signs. The wind was behind us the entire way into Great Bend. We flew down the road, covering 87 miles in four hours! We headed out of Dodge on US50 through Larned, which marks the midpoint between San Francisco and New York. We still have a ways to go before we reach our halfway point. US50 was just like the part of Kansas we had already passed through - mostly flat with broad expanses of wheat fields and tiny towns. The major difference is that we are now beyond the tree line and there are many trees lining the wheat fields and beautiful homes with large green lawns.

After sixty odd miles, we turned onto US 56E, passing Pawnee Rock, one of the way points (before gps) for the travelers on the Santa Fe Trail. I took the one-mile detour to see Pawnee Rock. If you are ever on US 56, you can save yourself the effort. There isn't much to see in Pawnee.

OK, I have to admit, I never heard of Great Bend, Kansas before, much less ever been there. It is, however, an interesting place to visit. Named after its location at the north end of a huge bend in the Arkansas River, the city was part of the aforementioned Santa Fe trail; it's been the home of the Fuller Brush Company since 1973; and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood depicted murders committed in Great Bend - scenes from the movie were also filmed there. Oh, and Smallville (superman's childhood home) is fictionally near Great Bend.

I don't think I've mentioned the trucks. There are lots of pigs and cattle raised in this part of the world, and they have to be taken to market. The stench of pig trucks is indescribable. Along with an unwelcome blast of wind that threatens to throw your bike off the road, the smell is wretched. Every time I see/smell one, I think about the pigs - where do they think they're going? Disneyland? Along with the livestock, come meat packing plants which employ large numbers of immigrants. The number of Latin Americans in the small towns of the high plains is staggering. Who thought you could get great Mexican food in Nowhere, Kansas?