"Why on earth?..."
Well, I was close in Kansas City for a meeting...
"I thought that was in Kansas."
No. Well yes, sort of. There is a Kansas City, Kansas, about 145,000 people in a low to middle income city just across the border from the much bigger Kansas City, Missouri. It's trying to upgrade itself...just built a huge NASCAR raceway (Kansas Raceway). I'll leave it at that. Kansas City, Mo., where I spent much of my growing up years, has close to 500,000 people and the whole metro area is 2.1 million.
When stationed in Oklahoma City way back when, I would drive occasionally from KC to OKC and pass through an area called the Flint hills, between Emporia and Wichita Kans. on I-35. It's long vistas of hills and prairies intrigued me and I always wanted to come back and investigate that area of tallgrass prairie ranges. So 41 years later I am doing so. It was never high enough on any list to take precious vacation days, so now that I can take the time, I am!
This flint and limestone rocky area extends from nothern Oklahoma to just south of the Nebraska border. It's rocky soil prevents trees from growing, but provides excellent land for prairie grass. More info on that tomorrow. I'll be visiting the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, which contains some of the last original tall grass prairie in the world.
Eastern Kansas is much like western Missouri, hilly, lots of trees and farms, benefitting from relatively rich soil and the humidity and rains that come up from the gulf. The further west you go in Kansas, the drier it gets and basically much of the land stretches out with great vistas of ridges rather than rolling hills.
When I was 7, we took a trip from Chicago (where I lived at that time) to the Ozarks in Missouri, then to Omaha, where many of our relatives lived. Part of the way took us up through very eastern Kansas on a 100+ degree day in our un-air conditioned 1952 Studebaker. I was not feeling well and was laying on my mother's lap when I "lost" my lunch in the empty fishing tackle bucket we had in the front seat. My folks always joked about my "reaction" to Kansas, and who knew then that a year or so later we would move to western Missouri, only a couple miles from the Kansas border. My dear mother probably would be asking the same question as the headline today! But she also taught me that with people and places, there are always good things in them. I'm investingating that tomorrow!
1952 Studebaker Champion...ours was gray.
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