Day 2 - Denver to Kansas City

Well, as I mentioned before, we got out of Denver (actually Littleton) rather late, so we knew we'd be late getting into Kansas City where Karla's other cousin, Bethany, would be hosting us for the next night.

After a quick stop at Walmart on the way out of town we climbed on I-70 and drove and drove and drove. While not quite as perfectly flat and boring as I had been told to expect (there are some vague hills), it was definitely the least interesting part of the entire trip.

As you can see, Madi is not happy to be in Kansas. :(

Such remarkable vistas!

Probably the highlight of the Kansas drive.

This was the usual scene out the window.

Flat as far as you can see in every direction.

This is an HDR image (I'll explain later in the post), poorly processed, but it shows Liz in the rearview and the outside view. (Normally the mirror and dash would be in silhouette to see the details outside, or the inside would look good and the outside would look like a nuclear blast.)

Madi is SUCH a sweet girl. She really handled the LONG drives very well. It screwed up her sleep schedule, but she played and slept a lot. We had my MacBook set up between the two front seats so they could watch fun movies on the drive, but Madi seemed generally disinterested in whatever was on the screen, and very interested in playing with my video camera bag strap. Go figure.

Karla handled the drive fairly well also. While I did most of the driving, she was happy to help when I needed a break. In Kansas that wasn't so much about actually being tired so much as bored out of my mind. Even hearing The Little Mermaid wasn't enough to keep me awake, so we had to trade off.

You'll have to click on this one to really see it. I did a panoramic photo in the truck, showing all of the girls. Unfortunately there was too much distortion in the shot of Liz when I combined them, so this only shows Madi & Karla and the spectacular view. :)

I guess I just get bored with regular pictures. For some reason I decided to do a panoramic shot

of our truck & trailer at Wendy's in some random town in Kansas.

It was about 3 am when we passed through Abiline (where Aubrey & crew lived forever), but I wanted to go see the town anyway.

This is a bad shot of la casa de Ortega. It's hard to take architectural photos in the middle of the night with bad lighting. I was able to angle the truck & trailer at the house (harder than it sounds) to shine the headlights enough to take a few pictures. The problem is that the headlights are focused so you get a really bright spot and everything else is dark. So I took 3 photos at different levels of brightness and combined them on the computer (easier than it sounds) to compensate. But I had to shoot at the highest sensitivity setting on our little camera with a small sensor. High sensitivity and small sensors both lead to noisy images, and the HDR process (combining bright and dark images to even out the highlights and shadows) emphasizes noise, so it's pretty ugly. And I don't currently have Photoshop installed to clean it up better.

Here's the result:

Anyway, it was fun to see Abilene. Cute, little town. I enjoyed how there are signs all over town about "historic [insert name here] mansion", yet every one of them was smaller than average homes in Draper or basically anywhere on the side of the mountains in Utah.

We didn't take any more pictures, but we got in to Kansas City around 4 am, and to Bethany's and in bed by 5. They quietly left for work while we slept in.