June 16 - North Platte, Nebraska - June 17 - 2018 McPherson, Kansas

The Black Hills of South Dakota was always on our list for this trip. As was Mt. Rushmore and the Badlands.
We also believed that South Dakota would be our last stop before returning to Minnesota.

 

Well, South Dakota was the 44th state we have been in since we started, and since we have time, we decided to dip down and “pick up” the remaining 4 states of the lower 48. These are states that you normally wouldn’t go to if you had 3-4 weeks of vacation in the US. Compared to many other areas of the US there is not a whole lot to see. But they deal with what they have been dealt, so there is always something to see.

 

Saturday, the 16th, we moved from Wall, South Dakota to North Platte, Nebraska. 300 miles/480 km.
Our impression of Nebraska was flat farmland for hundreds of miles. But more or less the whole trip was in a very hilly landscape. Turns out that one fourth of Nebraska consists of the Nebraska Sandhills.
The Sandhills were dunes (klitter) formed when the areas was a desert (ørken). Some hills are as high as 330 feet (100m). They are now covered with grass and used for grazing cattle, as the sand cannot be used for farming.

Sunday we moved from North Platte to Kansas. As soon as we moved east from North Platte we saw the landscape we had expected. Cornfields (majsmarker) on one side of the car. Cornfields on the other side of the car 😊.

Or wheat fields (hvedemarker) on both sides. Or grass for feeding cattle.

We were planning to stay in Larned, Kansas. We had not made any reservations but we figured that at least one of the two campgrounds in town would have a space for us, so we decided to just drive up.The first one was a hotel parking lot (parkeringsplads), so we drove to the next one. That was even worse – much worse.  An uneven gravel parking lot that had once been a gas station, and in a bad part of town!! ☹. It did not take us long to decide that Larned was not our town!

Before we moved on, we stopped to see what we actually came for: Fort Larned.

The Fort was established in 1860. It was the only fort on the Santa Fe trail (going from Independence, Missouri to Santa Fe, New Mexico). The Santa Fe trail became a very important trade route (handelsvej) and in order to protect the freight caravans against the Indians this fort was built. Later on, it also protected the workers building the railroads. There were at times between 150 and 400 soldiers at the fort. After less than twenty years (1878) there was no longer a need for the fort and it was abandoned. 

 

The National Park Service (what would we do without them 😊) has created a very interesting museum. The original buildings are intact and all the functions in the fort have been recreated.

Officers quarters (officersbolig)

Quarters (barakker) of the enlisted men (menige) - 4 people to one bunk bed!

We then moved on to McPherson, Kansas where we found an acceptable campground.

We ended up with a 360-mile move (575km). Driving through Kansas was much like what we saw in the last part of Nebraska. Lots of cornfields and wheatfields.  The farmers were busy harvesting the wheat.

One thing did surprise us about the Kansas landscape (as with the Sandhills in Nebraska): Oil pumps (also called pumpjacks). They were all over the place. Sometimes we had 20 in sight. A lot more than we saw in Texas.

And we thought Kansas was all about tumbleweeds (vindheks) and the Wizard  of Oz (Troldmanden fra Oz)!😊
You learn something new EVERY day!

Written by JJ