Old Osawatomie

GRAND ISLAND, NEBRASKA: I started out the day by blazing west across Missouri. My internet searches for world's biggest somethings had come up empty, so I decided on an alternate attraction: the John Brown State Historic Site in Osawatomie, Kansas. This was a bit south of my planned route, but to see the homestead of this great freedom fighter, I figured it was worth the trip. Brown, a free-soil settler in antebellum Kansas, lived in Osawatomie before setting off with his sons to commit the Pottawatomie Massacre some miles north (thus giving rise to one of his many nicknames, Osawatomie Brown). When pro-slavery forces sacked the state capital, most of the anti-slavery types just wrote their Congressmen. Not John Brown. He and his sons rode up to Pottawatomie and hacked five of the ringleaders to death with broadswords. That kind of old-time valor in pursuit of a righteous cause was just as hard-core then as it is now. The guerilla war in Kansas polarized the nation, and the Civil War soon followed (after some more freedom-fighting shenanigans by Brown in Harpers Ferry).

So, I figured it was worth the trip. The restored cabin was full of period artifacts, including a broadsword and some guns (the government only likes guns in museums, it seems). It was surrounded by a picnic area and park, which was in turn surround by a pretty little town, Osawatomie. A nice lady at the cabin gave me a brief explanation of the place (it was actually Brown's sister and brother-in-law's cabin, but he stayed there a while) at let me look around. I ate a sandwich at a picnic table outside, then returned to my trek.

It was about this time that it began to get as hot as a crotch. My USA Today weather map had shown the middle of the country in various shades of red for today, but feeling it was something different altogether. To be fair, what Westerners say about dry heat is somewhat true. But this is the difference between it feeling like 90 and feeling like 95. Either way, I was sweating my ass off all across Kansas. You may be asking, why not turn on the air conditioning? The answer is, I'm paranoid. I fear that the combination of 90-degree temperatures, driving 80 mph for hours on end, and cranking the A/C will cause a 1994 Toyota Camry to explode. Or at least overheat. What is this based on? Nothing, really. If any of you know about cars, please leave a comment one way or the other. In the meantime, I put on the A/C for short intervals, drink water, and take advantage of air-conditioned rest stops. Oh, here's a fun fact: while among the most architecturally interesting I've yet seen, Kansas rest stops are most notable for their complete lack of vending machines.

Most of the rest of the day was spend driving with the vent on full blast and the books-on-tape cranking away. At Salina, Kansas, I left I-70 and turned north on U.S. 81. This is kind of a local road, but there are so few towns that it's not much different from highway driving. Lots of farms, and some cows. The farm smell here (hay and cow shit) is different from that in the hills back east (bacon and sheep shit). This continued for sometime, then I arrived at I-80, and turned west for another forty minutes or so, until I finally arrived here, 664 miles later, in Grand Island.