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this in spite of the fact that Missouri looked a good deal like back home to us with its rolling, fertile farming country. But once more, it was a beautiful day but very hot. We traversed a perfect concrete highway without a break all the way from St. Louis to Lawrence, Kansas. In fact, despite my comments on the poor roads from Louisville to St. Louis, I now discover that we had good concrete all the way from Vincennes to Salina, Kansas so I'm assuming the Indiana roads were the offenders, Vincennes being right on the Illinois border. According to my diary, "we zoomed along 45 to 50 all day, making great time." We covered 312 miles that day and evidently considered we'd done very well. At that time, 300 miles a day was regarded as a good day's drive for anybody unless they left way before breakfast and drove after dark. We lunched at Jonesboro, Missouri and had dinner at the new Pickwick Hotel in Kansas City, run by Pickwick Stages. We were greatly impressed. We decided that the further west we went, the better the accomodations got. We spent the night at Lawrence, Kansas, in a brand new, small hotel, the Eldridge, which we found to be excellent, the last word in comfort although I doubt if they were air-conditioned; if they had been, I think I'd have mentioned it. In some of the old hotels in the hot places, there would be a huge ceiling fan to keep the air stirring and give the illusion of cooling. These fans had a horizontal two-bladed rotor maybe four-feet in diameter that ran very slowly but did quite a job. On this day, we spent $3.90 for meals and the Eldridge Hotel charged $4.50. Gasoline was 16 1/2¢ and appeared to be going up as we progressed westward. Oil was still 25[[cent symbol]] per quart and we put two quarts in Dodgem that day. In fact, oil consumption of a quart every 250-300 miles even on a relatively new car like Dodgem with 11,429 miles on it when we left Erie, didn't seem to be considered out of line. The only item that seems a bit high is "dark glasses" at 75¢.

Tuesday was another gorgeous day but it was growing hotter as we proceeded west and it was the hottest we'd had yet. We got two principal lessons that day--one in geography and one in wheat. As for the first, we drove 270 miles, to Hays, Kansas, and we still were less than two-thirds of the way across the state. Moreover, the lovely concrete road ended at Salina and from there to Hays, some 125 miles or so, I'd judge it was gravel but side and flat as I recall--this is, flat from side to side; it was also flat forward and backward for the most part for hundreds of miles in both directions, although the diary does refer to rolling country. My recollection is that the roll was extremely gentle. It began to dawn on us that the west is indeed a big place. This was the day that we got our first look at the "desert of wheat." The greatest sight was west of Salina where the wheat fields stretched away unbroken in all directions to the horizon sometimes twenty or thirty miles away. It was absolutely breathtaking! Marie Elliot had told me about the wheat fields in her native North Dakota