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Aug 07, 2004

 

EMERGENCY!!

Roberto's toothpain was worse, this morning. We couldn't find a dentist on Saturday morning in Las Vegas, NM, and we decided to get to Williamsburg as fast as we could. Vacations was over, sorry, guys. But, we were also worried with the car ... in our rush to get to Santa Fe, we really feared that it wouldn't make it in the highways. So we decided to drive in the secondary roads ... they are well kept, they go easy on the car and we don't go much slower than the highways, anyway. Besides, they are much more interesting than the highways, and if we couldn't stop for more tourist points, we could at least enjoy the ride.

On the road again. Tooth hurts like hell, taking horse-doses of Penicillin and other stuff, trying to get as fast as possible to Virginia.

Light sometimes goes off on the dashboard, the car is running good and fast.

The Great Plains, this is it.

 

Industrial Kansas, heart of poor hard working America? Seems like.

We would like to stop in Dodge City, but tooth, whole mouth hurts like hell. So this is the sign with the horse riders at the entry of town, all we havce seen.

And we succeed in improving the Kansas economy in being ticketed for speeding. 63 bucks, the corteous cop reassures me that it is a lot cheaper than in California.

It was very clear that we had left the desert behind. Every meter of land was cultivated or with forest, and we saw large extensions of pasture for cattle. We smell it, too. We left the highway at Springer, NM, and entered Oklahoma. After Boise city, we drove to Kansas through State Route 96. The names are familiar to anyone who has ever seen a John Wayne movie: Boise City, Elkhart and DODGE CITY. Sorry, no pictures. They have a big marker for the city, that looks like an outline of Bonanza, but we passed it too fast. We stopped at Hutchinson for dinner in a nice Mexican restaurante, with huge margaritas. Roberto's toothpain was a bit better, but not enough for him to chew anything.

We drove to Newton and Eldorado, and decided to keep on our secondary roads ... really pretty, with huge grain elevators everywhere. Lots of anti-abortion and pro-Bush outdoors, though. Our car has Kerry and Greenpeace stickers and we were a bit concerned. At the very last minute, we decided to take route 54 instead of 50 (just because our guide says it is a more scenic drive), and we drove to El Dorado. Where we got our first speeding ticket, for driving at 37 miles/hour in a 25 miles/hour area. We didn't even see the sign, as we were so concerned about finding the right turn for our route! By the time the policeman left us (very nice, very kind, but wrote down the ticket anyway) it was too late to go much further. We stopped at Eureka, Kansas.

Lise
 

Las Vegas, NM - Eureka, KS

 

613 miles