Day 2: Salina, KS

We are here in Salina, KS tonight finally laying in our sweet air mattress and gi-normous tent (no really, it's beyond enormous into the gi-normous category). We drove 406 miles today, mostly on highways, for a total of 711.4  miles for the trip (305 to Fordland yesterday). It took 8 hours to get here...and it was HOT. We ate some real good BBQ for dinner on the advice of Uncle Matt.  I forgot to mention earlier their big beautiful property with an amazing garden, peach trees, pond with a little pond house and a dog that can do math. Real math; addition and subtraction math. We didn't want to leave...but we did. We'll certainly be visiting again (maybe on our return home).

Everyone along the way has been very nice. We've yet to pay for refills on our waterbag. Speaking of waterbag...

Devin had this excellent idea to use his camelbak water bag on the bike (looks like a backpak with a big water bladder in it and a hose that you drink from). Our friend sold us his tourpack (a motorcycle trunk) and the camelbak fits right inside. There is a little hole that the hose fits right through. We are able to then drink ice cold water as we are going down the road. He even retrofitted it to 6 ft so that it reaches right up to him. Yesterday it was a dream. Today it was too, even when I realized that we had actually been dragging it down the road (4 lane HWY & interstate) for over 30 minutes. It lost its cap, got nice and black on the hose, and chewed up the mouthpiece pretty good. We've made sure it's tucked away very well ever since. You can see the battle scars in the pic below.

And that's not all...I filled up our waterbag at one stop only to come out and realize it was carbonated water. You know how you go to the fountain sodas and they have the little 'water' button....yeah it was carbonated. Devin liked it...said it was "refreshing"...made my stomach not so happy. The next stop I went in to refill it and, again, the fountain station 'water' was carbonated. I just used the wash sink. Guess we learned TWO things about the bike water...

Otherwise it's been pretty uneventful (thankfully).  A few other interesting points: 
Baxter, KS is the birthplace of waterjet cutting.
Chetopa is the pecan capital of Kansas.
One-lane road construction in Kansas is unique: They escort with a pilot vehicle that says "FOLLOW ME" because apparently we aren't smart enough to stay on the one side of the road for a mile and not hit the big flashing truck in the 10 meters of road they are working on...
The KOA in Salina, KS is supremo. If you ever come through here it's worth staying. Wish we had more time to really enjoy it.

Tomorrow we continue west to see several geographic features in Kansas. We will be staying the night with Devin's Uncle Mic & Aunt Carol near Tribune, KS. He's running out of uncles to stay with so I guess we'll have to really commit to this camping thing ;-)
Until then...