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10

when I first came to Erie in 1926 and how she loved and missed them so much, but I could never really appreciate her feeling. Now I could. I don't think I'd ever truly believed the stories I'd heard about the vast extent of the wheat acreage but I was now fully convinced. Sometimes it looked like the ocean with the wind blowing through it. And the road would stretch away from us for miles and miles in a straight line. Our road paralleled the Union Pacific over most of this route and as we would pass through a little town with its grain elevator along the railroad track, we could look ahead for miles and miles and see the grain elevator sticking up near the horizon at the next little town. We put up that night at the Lamer Hotel in Hays and it too was excellent. The room came to $4.00 and since there is no garage charge, I assume Dodgem spent the night in the open. Our meals that day came to $3.45. I had Dogem greased for $1.00 and added two quarts of oil at 30 [[cents]] a quart now--prices were going up the farther away from civilization we went. On the other hand, gasoline that day was only 14 [[cent symbol]] a gallon.

The next day, Wednesday, we attained our first big objective, Denver, a 370 mile run over nothing but gravel roads. We left Hays at 7:30 a.m. CST and arrived at Denver at 6:30 p.m. MST, or a twelve-hour drag with the temperature "100+ in the shade" according to the diary. A broken fan belt delayed us some. I don't see how we took this day, as it sounds like a killer to me. We saw the "desert of wheat" gradually fade away to be replaced in western Kansas and eastern Colorado by an arid prairie not far from a real desert. The photos of Dodgem and the "prairie detour" were taken in this area I'm pretty sure. It was one of the most godforsaken stretches of utterly uninteresting territory I'd ever seen and certainly a hell of a place to raise a crop of anything but sagebrush. I must confess that it was an unusual sight, the prairie unbroken in every direction with almost nothing growing there but sparse grass and sagebrush. The only things to break this scene were a herd of cattle here and there, and they must have had pretty slim feeding, and an occasional beautiful cactus flower contrasting with the desolation. But soon all was to change and I was to get one of those rare thrills that come only a few times in a whole life span. Late in the afternoon, we gradually began to make out Pike's Peak dimly in the distance. Then the whole range developed slowly out of the faraway haze, some of the mountains white-capped. The only mountains I'd ever seen were the Adirondacks, the Alleghenies, and the Blue Ridge, and what I was seeing now was the real thing, great peaks rising to 13,000-14,000 feet, their summits covered with snow. I was moved, thrilled, such as I'd never been before. I think this was the high spot of the trip, this first view of the Rockies. We put up at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Denver (@$6--back in the big city) but the garage was only 50 [[cents]]. Our meals that day were $3.50, gasoline @14 1/2 [[cents]], fan belt 95 [[cents]], and three more