Put yer red shoes on

East of Colorado we begin a couple of long driving days to cross the flat plains of Kansas. This is a place where you can tell a small village is coming up because there's a grain silo on the main street. This is a place where the land stretches out to the horizon and has no remarkable features for hours of driving. This is a land where in schools they're trying to stop teaching evolution in favour of only teaching the next generation that Adam and Eve are the reason we're here. This is the land where the Wizard of Oz was set and this is because we're entering Tornado country.We stop over at Dodge City. This place is moderately famous in America as the setting for a TV series in the 50's called Gunsmoke. The main street is named after it and the adjacent one is named 'Wyatt Earp Boulevard'. I've heard of Mr Earp and I'm sure he has some connection to the old west and gunslinging but after a mesmerisingly dull drive I don't care.
Dodge City is OK. A small town with cobbled streets and a bit of a crummy western style shopping area that costs something like $8 to park in. One thing you do notice here is the amount of Mexicans, there's hordes of them. We read that the Mexican food here is famously good but we don't want to overspend on the budget to find out, besides we've been to Mexico.
Out of town the landscape returns to it's former blandness. After a while we stop for petrol in a small middle of nowhere town. The usual barren land has become even more so and the trees about town seem twisted, bare and strange looking. Inside the petrol station I'm surprised how busy it is and how extensive the store is, considering there doesn't seem to be anything around here. At first it strikes us as another grim American town and we see that next door is the old supermarket that is now just a shell of wood and iron. We think it would be funny to drive down Main Street and mock it's run down and awful looking appearance but as we turn on to it something in my mind suddenly clicks. Before us is a main street consisting of two brick buildings, one boarded up, and nothing else but debris. This town was the unfortunate victim of a tornado in May 2007. It destroyed 95% of the town. Not much seems to have improved since then. I still don't understand the American way of building the majority of houses out of plywood. It's no surprise then that those buildings are wiped out and the brick ones survive. Still, it's a very unfortunate position to be in and the chances of a tornado wiping out a town are slim. Now a TV documentary has been released about the rebuilding of this place as a 'green' town. I'm not even sure if they're building it in the same place.
On we go through Wichita. I like the sound of this place and it's not too bad a city but like many others it's completely devoid of people. It's like they built the place and then moved. There's a strange mist hanging over the city and for miles around it smells like pipe tobacco, odd.

What's the capital of Kansas? Kansas City? No of course not, it's Topeka. If a more plain and dull state capital exists than this then we've yet to see it. This place can't even manage to string a decent street together and the standard capitol building is now looking as dull as all the others.
Avoiding the toll roads we take the backroads and Kansas is suddenly a lot more hilly than it seemed on the interstate. The roads lean left and right and up and down all over the place and makes for a more interesting drive, well it stops me falling asleep at the wheel at least.
We arrive near the state border of Missouri and Kansas City. This is strangely confusing to me and even now that we've been there I still don't understand what it's all about. Kansas City is in both Missouri and Kansas. I think there are two Kansas Cities but if so they are right next to each other on the border. The Kansas City in Kansas seemed to consist of nothing but interstate, that is to say we couldn't find it. The Kansas City on the Missouri side is in fact a proper city. How all this came to be I don't know. I do know that the road signs around here are the worst we've encountered and although we have a detailed map we get lost often.
Kansas City, that's in Missouri not Kansas, is not bad looking. The sky is grey and it's threatening rain around the high buildings and the odd bit of Gothic architecture. There's smatterings of art about as we take a look at the river front area, which is grim and industrial which looks even more so with the start of the rain. Still, there's sprinklings of cool stuff in-between the terminally run-down buildings. It feels like a city built on industry that's only recently begun to modernise itself into being a hip town.
And just like that we've left Kansas and are speeding through Missouri and into Iowa. The dullness continues!