Day 1:
We started out for our cross country adventure on Friday around 1:30 in the afternoon. The weather was bitter, especially for late May, and not at all the kind of weather you'd think of for the start of an exciting summer vacation. It was bitingly cold and dismally grey, with ominous looking storm clouds overhead.
We were eager to find warmer weather, so Mom drove the maximum speed and we didn't make extra stops if we could help it. Before long, Matthew fell asleep and Daniel settled in to read. He finished The Horse and His Boy, and then watched the landscape change for a while. We drove through a few small towns with huge stretches of prairie in between. We passed farms and cattle ranches. Often it rained; sometimes it hailed. As menacing as they looked, the clouds were still magnificent, three dimensional, villainous, pressing down on us. Alive.
An amateur meteorologist these days, Daniel particularly enjoyed watching their composition; commenting on the strength of the wind as evidenced by the movement of the clouds. Mom recited a poem on the topic by Christina Rosetti.
Who Has Seen the Wind?
Neither I nor you.
But when the leaves hang trembling,
The wind is passing through.
Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I.
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by.
Rosetti's wind sounds pretty meek compared to the battle happy gusts we encountered throughout eastern Colorado and West Kansas, along with the rain and hail, but there were decrescendos in the tumult. During one soft moment, we saw a graceful herd of antelope (pronghorns) cantering through the grass.
We'd planned to stop for the night and pitch our tent near Goodland, but the weather was just too wired for that. Mom heard the locals in the Dollar General discussing the previous night's winds at 91 miles an hour and predictions of the same and possible tornado conditions soon. So, the decision was made to press on and to get a hotel for the night, rather than attempting our first tent set up in darkness.
The boys didn't mind much, though all were ready to be out of the car. Daniel researched tornadoes in the back seat on his phone, then put in a movie. The boys watched Sound of Music as the sun went down. When we arrived in tornado-safe Hays, we rented a room at the Comfort Inn. The boys played (jumped on the bed) while Mom got things organized, and as quickly as we could, we went to sleep.
Day 2:
Matthew slept badly without his own space or sufficient darkness, and that meant no one slept all that well. We were all tired when the morning came, so we decided to enjoy a lazy morning in the hotel room, dozing, eating, and watching a the organization final film of Charlotte's Web, which happened to come on the hotel TV.
We ventured out of our comfy digs just in time for check-out, and as Mom opened the door and began pushing the luggage cart into the hall, what should burst through it but a very small, blonde and auburn long-haired chihuahua!
Momentarily disoriented as she was, Mom tried to get the dog out and to restrain Matthew, who had leapt to tackle the poor creature; Daniel started asking lots of questions, and Tasch, in full on service mode, looked on the whole scene, a tad bewildered. We never did figure out who the dog belonged to. The housekeeping staff seemed frightened of it, so we assume it didn't belong to the hotel. But we were hungry and decided its owners would come find it when they wanted to. Yappy little nuisance... We can't say we'd go looking for it...
Our next stop was at a nearby McDonald's which had been recommended by a friend for it's HUGE display case of retro happy meal toys in the kids play area. Yep. That's about what Kansas had offered by way of cultural attractions at that point. And they had all day pancakes available, so there was that.
We returned to the car and Mom put on an audiobook for herself. She only planned to listen to a chapter, but Daniel asked to keep listening, so we listened to five chapters instead. We meandered for several hours more through seemingly endless Kansas, searching for anything interesting, finding nothing but sky. It would have been nice to see something else to make the day feel worthier, but that's okay. Even in lovely weather, the Kansas sky is really something to behold.
Mom did start looking for campsites early in the day. We'd traveled much further already than expected for this point in the journey, so stopping early to practice setting up seemed wise. Besides that, we wanted to get started spending time in nature, playing with sticks and pinecones, and generally frolicking like fairies. But 'twas not to be. She followed route after route, only to discover that each campsite was either not suitable or had already filled because of the holiday weekend. By early evening we decided to get another hotel room and go for a swim. Nature would wait till tomorrow.
We shopped for rations (and took Tasch shopping in his first box store. He did beautifully, brilliant boy).
We checked in to a hotel, went to the pool but left after Daniel had some jacuzzi time as the pool was closed for cleaning, 
made a simple supper, and soon went to bed. We're all relaxed and happy. The trip hasn't been as we expected so far, which suits us fine because that's much of the point. Lovely and lazy and spontaneous, free of pressure or schedules or obligations. Perhaps tomorrow will be a bit fuller, with swimming in the morning and some Kansas City jazz at some point in the day. And Mom hopes to find a proper campsite for tomorrow night.
