8.9.2021
Driving through Kansas and Some Rocks
Wednesday morning did not start off ideal. On the way out of Kansas City I got carried away on the empty, straight, 75 mph speed-limit interstate, and forgot about speed limits for a second. I looked down at my speedometer, saw how fast I was going, looked up, and saw a cop sitting there in the median… I new right there I was about to get pulled over so I immediately started looking for a spot to pull over as the cop flipped on his lights.
Luckily, the sheriff let us off on a warning and ever since that I check my speed way more than I ever did, especially out west on the interstate. We told him how we were driving from Connecticut and we are very fortunate that the officer was having a good morning.
We had about 8 hours or so to Denver and since we woke up so early we decided to take a short detour during our drive to Monument Rocks in the middle of nowhere Kansas. The drive there was something we have never seen before and there were thousands of windmills.
We will both always remember the blue skies, flat but rolling hills, and being able to see all the way to the horizon without trees in the way.
We took a ~45 minute detour off the highway to go to a surreal rock formation in the middle of Kansas. I don’t know much about how they were formed but it really is a cool thing to see in the middle of farms.
The part I remember the most of the area was not necessarily the rocks themselves but when we stopped to get out of the car it was so quiet the only thing we could hear was bugs flying around near us. When the bugs stopped, you could practically hear your own heart beat. It was so peaceful and it was the quietest thing we both had ever heard.
Driving a few more hours to Denver, CO
After visiting the rocks we traveled back up 45 minutes to the interstate and continued our drive to Denver. I had been informed that at some point the mountains would come out of nowhere when approaching Colorado and we were confused as we entered Colorado there were no mountains. Little did we know there was another 2 hours of driving before we would be seeing anything else besides cows, wheat, cars, and road. As we approached Denver we finally started to get a view of the silhouettes of the mountains. It was a very hazy summer afternoon so it was hard to see the mountains so it didn’t really hit us yet that we were in Colorado when we got to our hotel.
When we arrived we were so relieved that we had made it to our first real destination. We were so excited to be more than halfway across the country, it was by far the farthest west we both had been.