plains

Day 3: 6/4/24
From: St. Louis, MO
To: Cedar Bluff State Park, KS
Distance: 561 miles

New rule: Don’t book an interior room that overlooks the gym. You *will* be woken up by weightlifters with every rep they finish…at 5 am.

thunk * thunk * thunk

Anyway, guess I’m up early. I’m ready to hit the road by 7 am. If only the kids were awake.

We nab a quick hotel breakfast before getting on the road, knowing the drive today will be a slog as we are pretty much on I-70 for 500+ miles through all of Missouri and most of Kansas.

The weather stays mostly pleasant, though thunderstorms threaten on the horizon for much of our drive through Kansas, which makes for dramatic sky photos, at least. Husband is a trooper, still acting as the sole driver even after 3 days, despite my offers to relieve him.

Children have reacted to Missouri and Kansas with the expected observations. “There is nothing here!” And “Why would people want to live here?” They agreed it all made more sense when you take into account the fact that the farming here is really good, so farmers want to live here, despite the constant threat of rain, tornadoes, and snowstorms.

On that, why don’t we read more about the European settlers’ reactions to seeing tornadoes for the first time? Can you imagine what the first European thought upon seeing one? How were they not terrified out their minds? How did they not turn around and run straight back to the east coast? Anyway. Welcome to my random thoughts as we travel the state of Kansas.

About an hour from our destination, we’re all starting to feel a little loopy. A quick bathroom break leads to a conversation with someone driving eastbound who inquires about the weather. He’s worried about the possibility of hail damage on his pretty orange Dodge Challenger.

I can’t blame him. We thought we’d hit the storm since so many pockets of rain kept forming south of I-70 and drifting northeast, but miraculously, the storm separated around us and we haven’t hit rain since leaving St. Louis.

“Most exciting thing in Kansas so far,” says Older Child about a long train loaded down with coal that traveled beside the highway. They’re not wrong.

The land has become so flat that even the billboards are at ground level because they don’t need to be elevated to be seen. But the oil pumps are staggered across the ground now and we all agree they look a bit like terrifying, angry iron horses.

Another two hours and we finally arrive at Cedar Bluff State Park in Middle-of-Nowhere Kansas. And oh, the sounds of Western meadowlarks, American goldfinch, Orchard orioles, and Northern bobwhites! That subtle hush of the wind across the plains! I’m in love. Again.

The evening brings a long slow sunset from the porch of our cabin for me and Younger Child while Husband and Older Child go to the nearby pond. After finding a discarded lure and some trashed fishing line, they make their own rod with a stick. Did they catch a fish? Of course. A bass. Because Husband can fish anywhere with anything. Including junk.

They also come back with this guy, who happened to be crossing the road as they were driving back. Since they didn’t want him to get smushed, they bring him to the cabin and release him into the meadow. Not long after, Husband catches sight of a whitetail deer dashing through the high grass. By this point, I’m fairly convinced the meadow is pure magic.

We enjoy the evening from the porch, eagerly awaiting the appearance of the first stars. A little stargazing and then we’ll call it a day. But wait, what’s that we hear? Coyotes! A pack howling and yipping somewhere in the distance. How exciting! What a way to end the day.

Tomorrow? We’ll bid farewell to the plains and head for the mountains and the trees.

Original Post: September 8, 2015

There came a point in our trip when we knew it would be time to turn around and head back home. Crater Lake didn’t really count (even though we’d changed directions), as it was still an amazing destination that I’d planned as part of the itinerary.

Idaho, however, was…well…

Idaho.

Before leaving for the trip, I’d asked a few friends who lived out west whether it was better to travel northern Idaho or southern. We needed to get to Yellowstone and I wanted to do it as quickly as possible, but what’s a few extra hours on the road if the scenery is nice, right? So we added an extra hour and a half and took the northern route as recommended. Why? Because it was pretty.

Or so I was told.

As I’m really not being very fair to Idaho, I should probably clarify. Northern Idaho is beautiful. (I’d been told the southern route was all desert, and we’d really seen quite enough of that.) Eastern Oregon and Washington, however, are not. Having seen the west coast of Oregon on a past trip, I pictured all of Oregon to be full of the amazingly green, incredibly dark piney forests that make western Oregon such a draw to nature lovers and neohippies everywhere.

In fact, I couldn’t have been more wrong. After the mountains faded into the distance, eastern Oregon looks the way I expected Kansas to look. (For the record, I was wrong there, too. Kansas is not grain. Kansas is corn. Oregon is grain. Lots of it.) And eastern Washington is very much the same.

Okay, so this part was pretty amazing. Mountains, horses, and beautiful blue skies, and miles and miles of road to travel.

But this part?

On film, stunning. In reality, breathtaking.

For an hour or so.

Hours upon hours? Not so much.

By the time we reached our cabin in Coeur d’Alene, I was very much contemplating the wisdom of my decision to travel northern Idaho, but Coeur d’Alene itself, particularly the lake, is beautiful. Our first stop in Idaho, naturally, was this –>

You can take the boy out of Cabela’s (in Hamburg), but you can’t take Cabela’s out of the boy…hence why we ended up in Cabela’s (in Coeur d’Alene).

A few dehydrated meals later, we were back on our way and reached the Osprey Perch Cabin at the Wolf Lodge Campground within a half hour. Nestled against the back of a mountain, it was a positively charming little A-frame…even if it did slant uphill and made me feel as though I was a little tipsy. Seriously, It’s odd the way a slight incline outdoors does nothing to your equilibrium, but the same slant inside is downright disturbing. Still, it didn’t detract from the charm.

We finally had a slow evening to ourselves, so we headed to Lake Coeur d’Alene for Nate to try his hand at fishing. I sat with camera at the ready, hoping to capture a bald eagle or two in the area, but to no avail. However, I did manage to capture a spectacular sunset!

Back at the cabin, we ate another dehydrated meal, shared a couple of mugs of hot tea and enjoyed the stars as they begin to dot the sky. At least until the mosquitoes showed up. Then it was inside and time for fun on the computer. We actually had a few hours to load photos and view them. Throughout the trip, I would try to download photos to my laptop every few days, but now I finally had time to look at them. (Imagine that!)

In the end, I was glad we took the northern Idaho route instead of southern, but those 9 hours in eastern Oregon and Washington was quite the test. A test of patience, a test of willpower, or a test of sanity – I’m not sure. But it was a test.

But I did discover that there was more to Idaho than just potatoes.

Come to think of it, I didn’t see a single potato. Maybe I should write the Idaho bureau of tourism.

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More than Just Potatoes