Day 15 - to Dodge City, Kansas

You're right, Kev.  Boulder is a beautiful city.  We couldn't fault the place.  Lots of trees, parks, out-door activities, outdoorsy people, fantastic scenery and great weather.

Here's Pearl Street Mall.  It's a pedestrian mall that extends a few blocks in the CBD.  

From there, we drove to the National Center for Atmospheric Research, at Boulder.  NCAR is a research and development centre devoted to service, research and education in the atmospheric and related sciences and is tucked into the base of a mountain range, called the Flatirons.  It's called that because there are several massive slabs of rock jutting out from the range, that resemble...flatirons.  I'm sure this is where PIXAR got the idea mimicking the Flatirons by using old Cadillac tail fins in their Cars movie.  Thanks to Nige for these two pictures.
 

The NCAR building is set in a wilderness area, with a number of walking tracks leading from just behind the building.  We were surprised to see deer wandering around, within a few metres of the NCAR building...

There were several interesting displays inside the NCAR building, including this man-made tornado.

We loved Boulder and didn't want to leave but we had an eight-hour drive to Dodge City, Kansas ahead of us, so we had to get on our way.  Here's an interesting shot Nige snapped out the window as we cruised down Interstate I-70.  This guy was moseying along at 70mph, happily drinking a can of 'I don't know what'.

 There's a small town about 20 minutes out of Boulder, near Denver, called Golden.  We took a scenic detour at Golden that sent us a couple of thousand feet up a mountain to Buffalo Bill's grave site.  Here's the view from the top, looking down to a highway way below.

And here's Buffalo Bill's grave.

This colourful butterfly was fluttering around the grave site.

Westward, and a couple of hours out of Denver, we stopped at a place called Limon to fuel up at a truck stop.
 

Despite being in the States for a fortnight, we have yet to set foot in a McDonald's - or Burger King for that matter.  We have been sampling Subway though.  They have a few more bread choices than we do in NZ - and they use spinach as well as lettuce...

Anyway, we had a reminder that we were back in Tornado Alley.  The truck stop Subway was also a Twister Shelter.
  

We had been warned several times that our trip through Kansas was going to pretty uneventful.  Just field after field after field of corn and pasture.  Well... they were right.  But to be fair, we were more interested Kansas's 'Big Sky'.



But we found things to amuse ourselves, like guessing road kill, counting contrails and wondering when the next corner was going to appear.

Then, out of the blue, this top dresser put a bit of a show on for us with a low-level flying display.  Here he is flying right alongside us.  We were doing 70mph at the time and he was passing us.
 

Otherwise, our view was very similar to this...

But it was very cool - the sky was just so....big.  Probably because there weren't any hills, I guess.

After a few hours, we turned off the Interstate and veered southward towards Dodge City.  Lots of dusty shingle roads down here.  We even saw some tumble weed!

Here's a typical Kansas farm scene.

We saw loads of windmills...

And more dust...

Thomas - this one's for you.  Can you see the "T" in the sky, made by crossing contrails?  The dots in the sky are part of our bug collection on the windscreen.

As we travelled further south, it got warmer and mirages started to appear on the roads.

 

We saw a few more Pumping Jacks...

But mostly more of this...

Jetmore was a 'city' of around 2500 people, about 50 miles from Dodge City.  The large pole to the left of the water tower held large PA sirens to warn the locals of impending tornadoes.

These two tanks kept guard of a Veterans Memorial Park just south of Jetmore.

Then finally, we rolled into Dodge City.