Whew, Kansas is a very wide state. People always write about how flat it is, but driving at least, the thing that struck us was how big it is. We still are 53 miles from the western end. It is flat, but flatness is not what I thought it would be. It doesn't mean that it's totally flat like a coastal plain in NC or even the valley bottoms in Silicon Valley. It means that the tiny little hills get smaller and farther apart as you go west. They still have slopes, so that you are likely to be driving up or down, but you'll take 3.5 miles to go down a vertical drop that you'd make walking to school in Maryland, and then another 3.5 miles to go back up the same small height. What that means is that when you crest that 100 foot hill the first time, you can see over seven miles of gently sloping hill. It's just less vertical. And as we get farther west, the areas that are flat like a coastal plain do seem to be growing. But that just means you can see each little hill even from miles away. Heck, you can see people's mail boxes sticking up above the horizon.
We passed a wind farm, and I have to say all four of us found it inspirational and beautiful; you could see these arms moving so gracefully and slowly, yet with a lot of momentum. It makes me think of the idea of American can-do, and left me with a pleased feeling that the world my children will inherit won't be a total disaster. My son was actually asleep, so he didn't get to comment, but my daughter seemed pretty impressed (she glanced up from her activity for more than 1 second).
I did see one outcropping of rock (aside from the ceaseless blasted hills destroyed to make way for the interstate) near Fort Riley, there was about 5 miles of boulders and rock-walls. But mostly there will low hills, shallow valleys, and streams and rivers with not a boulder to see.
We seem to have fallen into a good routine where I get up first, relax for a while, and then they get up and we get going for a few hours, then stop a few times for bathroom, more coffee, some sort of lunch-like experience, and then move into nap time, where my beloved life partner and son sleep, my daughter listens to books on tape and I drive. Then after the naps comes tea time which tends to mean McDonald's, plastic toys, more coffee, and some sort of ice cream or milk shake. Then we keep switch drivers and I perform intensive care on the dyad (reading stories to my daughter while simultaneously playing dinosaurs with my son and keeping their conflicts non-violent) until the end of day melt-down forces a stop. This latter period also has the odd bits of peace when I can read some more. My morning peaceful reading is the Hofstadter and the bits and pieces I get during the day are the sci-fi Banks.
We had to say good bye this morning to my Missouri family, and my son again exhibited his full dislike for saying goodbye, refusing to meet my uncle's eyes and then enthusiastically waving as we drove off. An hour or so later, he was asking when we'd see "that boy," his older cousin who shares a first name with him.
We also had a number of talks about our "house" and where is was and where is California and so on.
Fortunately, tonight's motel has a very nice hot tub, where one can stretch ones legs and forget the strain caused by trying to explain the massive changes going on to some one with a relative experience of time that seems to be 10 times different than my experience (in other words, I'm 40 and he's almost four, so I assume that each minute for him is like 10 minutes for me, and each 10 hour day in the car is like 100 hours of driving, thankfully broken up by that nap).
Despite the relaxation, the hot tubs have brought up an interesting parenting dilemma. My kids have always been allowed by me to go into the hot tub, despite the occasional signs warning against young children. We don't stay in the hot water endlessly, and when they are smaller they hop out after a few minutes, as though they are able to regulate their own sense of being too hot. But the second night, there was a staff person there to insist that no kids could go into the hot tub; so I didn't go in either, but we had to talk about why we couldn't go into that hot tub, and the next night had to talk about why we would go into the next hot tub, and in fact I just answered my daughter's question "Can we go into the hot tub" with "It depends on if there is someone there to keep us out." I'm not really happy with that explanation, but I can't argue myself into deprived the kids of something they enjoy and are perfectly safe doing, when I can tell that these signs about kids are put their by the lawyers because of some fears of what some unobservant parents will do. But then again, it's not obvious how to distinguish situations like that and situations like when we are hiking on the cliffs near the Potomac and it really is important not to go near the edge. My daughter was very pleased to go and check and then report that in fact no one was watching but then she was unhappy that I wanted to spend so much time soaking and not enough time playing drama games in the normal but cold pool.
We had some funny issues with the car GPS today: it kept getting confused and asking us to go in great loops or to go hundreds of miles out of the way. If we kept going with our google maps based plan, eventually it gave up on its random things, but the "Miles to go to destination" kept getting bumped upwards by hundreds of miles. For most of the day we thought we had over 2,000 miles left, but really we are merely 1,500 miles away from San Jose. Well, I write merely in a sarcastic fashion, but it means we are more than 1/2 of the way through.
Good night.
--Chris
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