We are scheduled to dog sit at my brother’s in Arkansas while they travel in Europe, so we have to decide which route we want to take from LA.  We want to revisit some of the spots along Hwy 160 in southern Colorado that we enjoyed so much last summer, so it is decided that we will take Interstate 40 to Gallup, New Mexico, then turn north and head up to Cortez, Colorado, and pick up Hwy 160 there.  We stayed at Target Tree Forest Service Campground—a top-notch spot in our opinion.  The campsites here are situated so that you can’t see other campers unless you are walking past on the road.  Beautiful birdsong here and a curious cow and calf looking at us over the boundary fence.  We crossed the Continental Divide at Wolf Pass and cruised into La Junta on the eastern Colorado plains.  The weather app warned of scattered thunderstorms and possible flooding in the La Junta area, so we were a little apprehensive as we traveled there. When we arrived, the place was uncomfortably hot and dry as a bone.  It was 7 pm on a Friday evening and we could not find an open dinner restaurant.  We were hoping for a nice sit-down Mexican food meal, or perhaps a steak, but had to settle for the Sonic Drive-in.  Boo.  It was hard to imagine why no place was open for business at dinner time on a Friday night, but it was an example of how our expectations do not always match local custom.

After La Junta we crossed into Kansas, my home state.  At Dodge City we took the northern fork in the road and headed for the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve near Strong City.  This is a surviving remnant of the prairie as the pioneers found it.  Grass that can grow as tall as 8 feet high by the autumn of a good year and a herd of 500,000 buffalo.  We hiked here early one morning.  Located in the Flint Hills of Kansas, the rolling landscape was breathtaking.  So lush and green, a picturesque pond in a cleft of the hillside, the intermittent call of a Bob-white and the song of the meadowlark soothed my soul as we walked over the hills.  We read all the posted warning signs, then walked through the gate into the bison  pasture.   The path was wide and graveled, surrounded by acres and acres of tangled grasses and wild flowers.  We passed dried buffalo chips and mud wallows, and in the distance we could see groups of grazing buffalo.  As the trail ascended and began to curve, we approached quietly as the rolling landscape did not allow us a complete view of the pasture.  We did not want to surprise (or BE surprised) by any buffalo.  They are not placid like cows!  Suddenly the path rose up and we began to see buffalo that were much closer than those we had seen previously.  Looking at a curve on a rise ahead, we saw a buffalo standing right beside the trail.  At that point we very quietly turned around to retrace our path.  We were pretty sure we were not prepared to outrun a buffalo.  So magnificent to see them, though.  A wonderful spot to spend a morning.  Back at the visitor center, we toured a huge two-story limestone barn and house of the original farmstead, built in the 1870s.  The outhouse was built of limestone too.  It had glass windows (with curtains!) on the sides.  I had never seen such a fancy outhouse.

From the Preserve we drove due South, still in the Flint Hills, to Howard, Kansas, where my Workman grandparents had spent their retirement years after running small dairies at various rented farms around the area.  Grandpa Roy  milked the cows, Grandma Clara fed the calves with nippled buckets of milk that they butted and banged against the fence until they barely resembled buckets any more.  Grandma also ran the milk separator, putting the cream aside and getting the milk into the metal cans for the milk truck to pick up on its route.  My Dad and his 3 brothers broke horses for people in their teenage years.  In Howard we visited Grace Lawn  Cemetery where Grandma and Grandpa, and my parents, Walter and Ruth, are buried.

After Howard, we drove East to Oak Valley, a little unincorporated village where my Grandma Eva Wheeler Russell was born, the youngest of eleven children, and lived her entire life. She was the schoolteacher there until she married; then was the local midwife.  She wrote the “items” for the weekly paper.  Which meant that she told who had been in town to visit relatives and what was served at those gatherings, plus details of big dinners held in the old schoolhouse.  She always seemed to end with “A good time was had by all.”

Grandpa Harry did many things over the years.  He put on magic shows and Grandma played the piano in the background.  My mom claimed that she was the girl who got sawed in half at each show, but she wouldn’t tell how it was done. Grandpa also foraged for roots and herbs and sold them to the area pharmacists.  Oak Valley was pretty much empty when I was a kid, and its old grocery store is gone.  The old town well hand pump sits at the crossroads still.  We visited the graves of my Russell grandparents at the Oak Valley Cemetery, as well as those of my  grandma's Wheeler parents and Hughes grandparents.  It was good to see these places of my childhood again and to remember so many early experiences and beloved people.