Day 15: Back Home in Kansas and OKC!!

We left the hotel in Kearney at about 9:45 and drove east on I-80 until we hit State Highway 81 and took it south to Salina, where Bud and Rita and Boyd and Betty branched off from Carrie and I took I-70 east back to Topeka and Ottawa. That was an emotional moment for Carrie and I and I'm sure it was for the others as well. Before we got to Salina, we stopped for lunch in Concordia, Kansas, where we hit the local Dairy Queen. Grandma was hankering for an ice cream cone, but she and Boyd ended up getting hot fudge sundaes, while Rita and I got Blizzards and Carrie had the cone.

Our drive through Nebraska was filled with corn. The sports teams are not known as the Cornhuskers for nothing. We did see one field that was strictly being grown for ethanol, and a gas station we stopped at in Nebraska was selling ethanol-enhanced gas for cheaper than regular unleaded. Interesting. Speaking of gas, our total gas bills were pretty impressive. The van consumed around 900 dollars in fuel, while the Prius only cost around 250 dollars to make the round trip. That's not a typo. I can' encourage people enough to seriously think about buying a Prius whenever they are ready to change vehicles. Boyd drove it at one point and loved it.

Well, that pretty much does it for the blog. I'm going to put up one more post as a kind of post-trip reflection and appreciation piece, so look for that in the next week. But until then it's back to work and back to the real world.

Day 15

--BDC