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We took off the next day for Louisville. It was clear and 100° in the shade at 5 p.m. at Oakley, Kansas. It was the hottest drive we'd had so far but we pushed all the way through to Hays, Kansas, 371 miles, in ten hours and forty-five minutes overall. Once we plowed down a soft shoulder while passing a "Little Eva" which is what we called road scrapers, and we had to be hauled out of the ditch by the tractor. Another time, we got stuck in the sand and I had to get out and push. We wound up in Hays half dead but in time to get the last room left in the Lamer Hotel, where we'd stayed driving out. We were lucky because the next hotel, if there was one, was probably a beaut, and we were too exhausted to push on any farther that night. The diary says, "The Colorado roads east of Denver are terrible!" This was the last day I kept the expense record for some reason, perhaps because at this point I could begin to see that we had plenty of money to make it back without any problems. So, just to complete the record, I'll put down this last day of expenses:

The following day, Thursday, we drove from Hays to Kansas City, Missouri, 305 miles. The diary says it was "HOT-—100°+" and apparently it was pretty bad. We drove about all day through the wheat country in harvest and the fields were blazing gold in all directions. We had a puncture in Junction City and I had to change wheels in that heat—-it was 101° in the garage where we stopped to get the tube fixed. However, they told us that it [[underlined]]frequently[[/underlined]] got up to 110° there, all the readings in the shade, of course. It was so hot that we considered pushing on to Columbia, Missouri, after dinner just to avoid hot hotel rooms as long as possible and get a little air moving over us as the car rolled along. But we were tired and finally decided to spend the night at Kansas City where we put up at the Pickwick, which had impressed us so favorably on the trip out. However, we spent one of the hottest nights on record at the Pickwick. The beds were even hot to the touch. Mother finally lay down on the floor at 3 a.m. because it was a degree or so cooler there. The trip back had unquestionably developed into one of the most trying experiences any of us had ever gone through because of the terrible heat and in the days before hotel air conditioning, there didn't seem to be much you could do about it. This situation, I'm sure, was one which we hadn't even thought of as we planned the trip. From that time on, when they talked about it getting hot in the middle west in the summer, I knew they weren't exaggerating one tiny bit. It was just about murder!

Transcription Notes:
Eliminated hyphens: "if a word is hyphenated because it goes across two lines, type it out as one word." Changed time to kind.