heading out of kansas picture post
Lordy. Oklahoma is a difficult state to find camping. After quite a struggle, i got a spot at a state park for tonight. It's another one of those flop-ass states/provinces like Alberta where you have to book your spot on the internet, no exceptions. Fortunately, there is much, much better 4G coverage here than in the black hole of Kansas/Missouri/Iowa. Let's get some pictures of Kansas uploaded. Lots of tourist stuff for ya.
I'll start with my bemused selfie in front of the world's biggest ball of twine. They decorated it with a jack'o'lantern face for the season.
This looked to be an abandoned church out in the middle of the prairie. There weren't any signs, so i dunno. Some locals had set up large wooden crosses in the nearby fields, although not sure if they were related.
Here we are, the center of the contiguous states!
Heading up a dirt road toward a grain silo. There aren't many real gravel roads in Kansas, most of them are packed dirt.
Mural on the side of a laundromat in the middle of nowhere.
Here she is! Lady Liberty of the prairies! Also pretty much in the middle of nowhere. Isn't she great?
Here is the view that the mini statue of liberty is casting her eye over.
A glorious prairie road to nowhere. These roads are the best, i wish i could cycle down them all day.
Tried to get a quick snapshot of these birds going wild. You can see the storm up ahead that i got caught in somewhere between Lucas and Wilson.
An abandoned building outside of Lucas that someone decorated.
This is not the giant Czech egg that is in Wilson. I was soaking wet and it was pouring with rain and i could not get a good angle. This is one of the smaller Czech eggs posted around town. I like that it has a sunflower on it, which is a motif that pops up all over Kansas.
Inside an old Atlas missile silo. This pull handle is a release for the escape hatch on the right, which was filled with sand to shield from a nuclear blast. The theory is the sand would fall out and the guys inside could escape, but i wonder if the sand could've turned to glass and left them trapped anyway?
Old ICBM console, gutted before the silo went on the private market.
This is a picture looking up from inside the main shaft where the missile would be. Those are the blast doors at the top where the missile would be lifted up through for deployment. It goes down a whole bunch more, but these silos are filled with water nowadays as part of the decomissioning.
I thought it was amusing to see "no smoking" signs inside the bunker. I guess the guys were allowed to smoke in the control room, just not in the missile shaft.
Morning on the prairie. Red sky in the morning, shepherd's warning. I did not heed the warning.
This is the rain wall i managed to cycle out of after getting epicly dumped on. I was only dry for a few minutes before it caught back up again.
You really, really don't want to be stuck on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere when a storm like this hits. It sucked. Very hard.
This is a very wet selfie after i got back on the highway and cycled through the storm to the next exit. The next exit went nowhere, just back into the prairie. So i got back on the highway, and then the storm hit even fucking harder, with hailstones, lightning and thunder for the next hour. It was brutal. Without 4G, i had no way to know where it was going or how long it'd last.
So far Oklahoma has not been as picturesque, but given the odd zig-zags i'm doing to try find camping spots, i might be here a while.
I'll start with my bemused selfie in front of the world's biggest ball of twine. They decorated it with a jack'o'lantern face for the season.
This looked to be an abandoned church out in the middle of the prairie. There weren't any signs, so i dunno. Some locals had set up large wooden crosses in the nearby fields, although not sure if they were related.
Here we are, the center of the contiguous states!
Heading up a dirt road toward a grain silo. There aren't many real gravel roads in Kansas, most of them are packed dirt.
Mural on the side of a laundromat in the middle of nowhere.
Here she is! Lady Liberty of the prairies! Also pretty much in the middle of nowhere. Isn't she great?
Here is the view that the mini statue of liberty is casting her eye over.
A glorious prairie road to nowhere. These roads are the best, i wish i could cycle down them all day.
Tried to get a quick snapshot of these birds going wild. You can see the storm up ahead that i got caught in somewhere between Lucas and Wilson.
An abandoned building outside of Lucas that someone decorated.
This is not the giant Czech egg that is in Wilson. I was soaking wet and it was pouring with rain and i could not get a good angle. This is one of the smaller Czech eggs posted around town. I like that it has a sunflower on it, which is a motif that pops up all over Kansas.
Inside an old Atlas missile silo. This pull handle is a release for the escape hatch on the right, which was filled with sand to shield from a nuclear blast. The theory is the sand would fall out and the guys inside could escape, but i wonder if the sand could've turned to glass and left them trapped anyway?
Old ICBM console, gutted before the silo went on the private market.
This is a picture looking up from inside the main shaft where the missile would be. Those are the blast doors at the top where the missile would be lifted up through for deployment. It goes down a whole bunch more, but these silos are filled with water nowadays as part of the decomissioning.
I thought it was amusing to see "no smoking" signs inside the bunker. I guess the guys were allowed to smoke in the control room, just not in the missile shaft.
Morning on the prairie. Red sky in the morning, shepherd's warning. I did not heed the warning.
This is the rain wall i managed to cycle out of after getting epicly dumped on. I was only dry for a few minutes before it caught back up again.
You really, really don't want to be stuck on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere when a storm like this hits. It sucked. Very hard.
This is a very wet selfie after i got back on the highway and cycled through the storm to the next exit. The next exit went nowhere, just back into the prairie. So i got back on the highway, and then the storm hit even fucking harder, with hailstones, lightning and thunder for the next hour. It was brutal. Without 4G, i had no way to know where it was going or how long it'd last.
So far Oklahoma has not been as picturesque, but given the odd zig-zags i'm doing to try find camping spots, i might be here a while.