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Last Thursday through Saturday, we visited Trevor’s parents in Sublette, Kansas. The small town of 1200 is at the extreme south-west corner of the state, closer to Denver than to Kansas City.

Some highlights from the trip:

The Simple Office Life
This was, bar-none, the longest drive I’ve ever made in one day, but the 17 hours spent between departure from Chicago and arrival in Sublette honestly went by faster than most days do. I wonder what changes in a person beyond a certain age that makes a car ride suddenly tolerable?

I guess one thing is modern technology. Armed with a power strip plugged into a cigarette-lighter adapter in my trunk, we were outfitted with two laptops whenever desired. Between the four of us (Julie, Matt, Danny, and me), we watched quite a lot of The Simple Life season two and The Office while in the car. Loves it. That’s what she said.

It wasn’t planned this way, but I happened to end up driving for about 13 of the roughly 15 driving hours, and I’m pleased to report that the routine maintenance (including new brakes) done on my car before we left has it running as good as new. I also managed about 27 miles per gallon at an average speed of around 85 miles per hour, which I owe to freshly inflated tires and a complete engine cleaning. High marks on the road trip metrics.

UFOs
Night fell at about 9 on Friday night, and we stopped in Oakley, Kansas for dinner. Colonial Steakhouse (or something equally patriotic) was the only restaurant in the town, and our exceedingly pleasant waitress served a really tasty brisket sandwich with thick-cut homemade potato chips. After dinner, we settled back into the car. The last three hours were the only part of the entire trip not on at least a four-lane road, but it didn’t matter much with a 65 mile per hour speed limit and unlimited sightlines.

I mean unlimited. The topography of the western two-thirds of Kansas is… well, lets say it barely merits the word “topography.” Fields and fields and fields stretch as far as the eye can see; as we found out, the only trees to be found are located next to living places. This is fine–if boring–in the day. At night, not so much.

The lack of light pollution lets every star shine bright. It also prohibits seeing much beyond the reach of the headlights, and a car approaching in the opposite direction seems to be bearing down on you forever. You can see the headlights a good 4 or 5 minutes before you pass each other at a relative velocity of more than 140 miles per hour. (Bonus points for any one who does the math on that and correctly identifies how many miles you must be able to see).

And because the topography is so constant and low, anything more than maybe 30 feet off the ground (and quite a few things lower than that for some reason) gets a blinking light on top of it to ward off the occasional crop-duster. In every direction, these blinking lights (in red, yellow, white, the rare green) give the appearance of much more life than there is.

In a break between Simple Life episodes, someone noticed that one of the lights was moving. I quickly rationalized it away: that light is simply closer than the lights behind it. It can’t be moving.

A few miles later, though, there was definitely a light moving. And then another a few miles later. These periodic UFOs kind of spooked us all.

Sublette
And finally, at 11:40pm, 17 hours after we left, we arrived in Sublette. Trevor’s parents had waited up for us, and after unloading the car we talked with them for about an hour before crashing for the night. (Incidentally, the UFO lights are at the end of the irrigation systems. If you’ve ever flown over the midsection of the country, you’ve seen the circular fields; at the center of these, an irrigation system pivots around a water supply; they blink so that farmers can see that they’re active even after dark).

When we woke up the next morning, we saw Sublette for the first time.

That’s… pretty much it. In our time there, we got a tour of the town, visited Trevor’s grave, had a wonderful steak and potato dinner prepared by Deb, went to a carnival in a neighboring town, and spent some time in their hot tub. The day there went incredibly quickly…

Greensburg
…and in no time, we were back on the road. With Deb and Jeff leading us to Kansas City (they had some things to do there), we went a different route than we’d come. It including passing by Greensburg, Kansas, the town devastated by an EF5 tornado a few weeks ago. While we couldn’t pass directly through the town, we could see the surrounding areas. The trees were stripped of their leaves and bark, roofs were ripped off of houses, and roads were still flooded. Although the running joke was that the tornado was the only thing to talk about in Kansas (conversation got back to it several times), I was glad we got to at least glimpse some of the tragic results of the first storm to be categorized “EF5″ (read about the new rating system instituted in Feb, 2007).

Dinner
At around 3:30, we arrived in Kansas City and parted ways with Jeff and Deb. Rick and Allison, Trevor’s relatively liberal uncle and aunt, joined us for an early dinner at Yard House. Their phenomenal schtick? They have the most beers on tap in the world. We all got a different beer (or two), and caught up from where we left off about a year ago. (A cool side note: Rick is Deputy Chief of Police for Kansas City, KS (KC, MO has their own); he is highly likely to replace the soon-to-be-retiring Chief of Police). It was great to see them; they are incredibly grounded, friendly people.

Iowa 80
Our last stop was at the World’s Largest Truck Stop. Enough said.

Summary
17 hours drive there
33 hours there
16 hours drive home
2100 miles total