Day Five: Kansas in the Car
Okay so yesterday was chock full of fun facts and adventure. Today is going to be a little more boring because we spent the whole day in Kansas in the car. Kansas, as we said yesterday, is rather dull. There’s the occasional group of cows or horses, and many wind farms, which were actually pretty cool. Ian is super into windmills and wind energy, so he was having the time of his life driving past all of the wind farms. Did you know that just 90 minutes of a spinning wind turbine can produce enough energy to power a house for one month? Wild, huh?
As we drove across virtually the entire width of Kansas, we started to wonder when we would be gaining elevation. Slowly and steadily, that’s how. Kansas is surprisingly hilly, in a long and gradual kind of way. Do you want to hear something crazy? The highest point of elevation in Kansas is higher than the highest point in Maryland!
In Maryland, the highest point is a place called Hoye Crest on Backbone Mountain somewhere in the Alleghany Mountains in Garrett County at 3,360 feet. The highest point in Kansas is this place called Mount Sunflower, which sits at 4,039 feet in the middle of someone’s home property and is not an actual mountain peak. You’d never guess Kansas would get that high, given that much of the rest of the state sits at about 1,000 feet or less.
Now that we’ve got you roped in with all of these fun facts, here’s one more for you. Kansas is not even in the top five flattest states in the US. It’s only number 7! Here are the other six flattest states:
Florida
Illinois
North Dakota
Louisiana
Minnesota
Delaware
I know now you’re probably wild about these Kansas fun facts. As you drive from Kansas into Colorado, the town that sits on the border between the two is called Kanorado (pretty clever, right?). Eastern Colorado is pretty much Kansas 2.0. We were so excited (clearly naively) to see mountains on mountains on mountains once we got to Colorado. Wrong. Until you get closer to Denver and the airport Colorado is just as barren and boring as Kansas is. For reference, the tallest point in Colorado is Mt. Elbert, which sits at 14,440 feet. This puts Kansas and Maryland to shame, for sure.
Once the mountains broke in Colorado, Ian was pretty transfixed, which was fine because I was driving, not him. Traffic picked up along with the mountains, but the boat (that’s what we call the F150) and the trailer did just fine and we all made it to our Air B&B in Fort Collins in one piece. Ian did an AMAZING job backing up the trailer into the driveway of the Air B&B. He would have made Phil Lindberg proud (sorry to those of you who don’t understand that reference). We arrived in Fort Collins around 4:30 PM MST, so we still had some daylight left to get a beer and some dinner.
Per the recommendation of our Air B&B hosts, we went to this family-owned, hole-in-the-wall type brewery called Intersect Brewing, situated in the back corner of a strip mall between a Chinese restaurant and a Safeway. This place was awesome, and I’m sad that we left just as Tuesday night bingo was just getting started. This place gave you the option of choosing up to eight beers in a flight and served it up on a spinning board (pictured below).
The atmosphere was great. The beer was great. We also got some pizza to-go for dinner back at the Air B&B as well as some frozen breakfast burritos for breakfast for the next couple of days while we were in Fort Collins. We finished the show Schitt’s Creek while we ate dinner, which is an absolutely fantastic Canadian comedy starring Dan and Eugene Levy, among others, about a rich and pretentious family who loses all of their wealth and moves to a tiny town called Schitts Creek. It is a Katie Swanson recommendation and now a Swatson recommendation as well. It’s on Netflix, it’s great, please watch it. It’s also shockingly relatable to real life. The entire last season was about weddings and moving away from home and your family, which has been very real for Ian and I this year as well.
Tomorrow we aren’t doing any long haul driving and are allowing ourselves one free day to explore Fort Collins. This should be a nice break from a full driving day today and another full driving day on the last leg from Fort Collins to Salt Lake City. Get excited because we should have some amazing mountain view photos for you tomorrow!
