Halstead, KS 10-13

A little birdie told me today that he thought the blogs have gotten a little short. Good to know I haven’t been boring you all with my ramblings! Mostly I just wasn’t “feeling” the witty repartee! Happens to the best of us…tee hee.

I forgot to mention that the place we stayed last night and the night before was not a Passport Park and we had to pay the big bucks. It was $20.70 a night for full hook ups. The lake view was definitely worth it though. It was a nice park. Cedar Oaks RV Resort in Grove, Oklahoma.

Last night didn’t get as cold as predicted, but it still got into the low 40’s. The high today was 65 and it was a lovely sunny day.

From Grove we headed north on 59 to 69 through Miami, pronounced by the locals Miama. After crossing into Kansas we hooked up to highway 400 and headed west. We were heading to a little town called Fredonia, there was a Passport Park there, but upon finding it we went, nuh-uhh. The town was old and had a lot of historic buildings but the supposed RV park was a very run down mobile home park. We just decided to keep on to the next one. West of Fall River we caught highway 99 north to catch 54 west. We wanted to bypass Wichita.

We found a place to park in the little town of Eureka and had lunch. As we entered the next town of El Dorado we could see all these lovely old brick buildings and as we hit town all of them were churches and they were very large. El Dorado was good sized and very nice. We liked it a lot. There were some beautiful, large, historic homes. We took 196 which hooked us onto I-135 and then we headed west again on 50 to Halstead.

Kansas is the last new state for us for awhile. All over the place here are Osage Orange trees also known as Hedge Apples or Row Apples. The wood of these trees was the favorite for making bows. We have seen some things made with the wood and it is a really pretty wood. These large fruits seem to be good for nothing though. They are just fun to look at and we had cut one open last year and they have a very sticky sap. These trees were planted by the early settlers for fences as they have very wicked thorns and helped contain animals. Later the wood was used for the posts that early barbed wire was strung on.

We had a long day traveling today. We left at 9:45, traveled 269 miles and didn’t land until around 4:00. We are at Spring Lake RV resort, a passport park…$13.50 a night. They claim they are the largest RV park in all of Kansas. It is very large but the sites aren’t anything stupendous. There are 8 ponds and a creek, we saw lots of turtles this evening on our walk…I didn’t have my camera, so tomorrow I expect there might be a turtle picture here somewhere. They are pretty shy, they plopped into the water when they felt we were getting to close.

We plan on staying here at least until Sunday. We went through Halstead today and the whole main part of town had brick streets; pretty and very bumpy. Quite a lot to check out around here so we might stay a little longer, we’ll have to see.