363. Garden City, Finney County (KS004)

As you can tell, the light was getting slight and the day was coming to an end. Actually, it wasn’t. It’s just that the sun was low enough that it was near everything I tried to photograph, making it look like it was getting dark, when in fact, I just couldn’t get an angle that wasn’t being overcome by the bright of the sinking daystar. Even though it was still daylight, I really couldn’t have done much more before night truly set in. I was a little tired and ready to pack it in for the night. Of course, that was tempered with a little bit of nervous energy. I knew where I was going to be the next day and was more than ready to get there.

Well, OK, that was only part of it. I’m always a little keyed up when I travel. In real life (and by that I mean at home), I can sleep in to levels undreamt of (which I probably can dream of because I’m sleeping in). When I travel, though, sleep is something that other people do. I can sleep all I want at home. When I’m in <enter location here>, I have too much to see and too much to do to waste it on something as mundane as sleep. I can sleep when I’m dead. It is a biological need, though. I can only go without it so long. Out on the road, though, it only comes in fits and spurts. But come it would have to and Garden City was as good a place as any to do it. Besides, with all the travel I’ve been doing over the last couple of years, I’ve started using the same hotel chain. It’s a little more expensive than some of the hotels I’ve stayed in on my journeys, but there is at least a uniformity to them that justifies the price. And, to be honest, some of the places I’ve stayed have been a bit suspect AND expensive because, thanks to the oil field booms in the Permian and East Texas, I’ve had to compete with drilling crews with vast amounts of cash and nowhere to spend it for lodging. Nope. If I’m going to stay places, earning points for free nights and such seems like a good idea.

I went ahead and snagged a cache on the outskirts of town. It was dedicated to all the linemen of the Wichita variety and their eponymous song. I found it half buried and the last few finders said they found it stuck, assumedly in one of the jackets on the support lines. The least I could do was put it back the way they wanted?

Once that was done, I grabbed a little food and put in for the night. Spent a little time double checking routes and letting a few people know that I wasn’t lying in a ditch on the side of the road somewhere (which, unfortunately, is always a non-zero possibility) before snuggling up under covers for a night of well deserved rest. Of course, I was up well before the crack of dawn because I was travelling, and even earlier than I would have been of my own volition, because I had to start the morning somewhere. That, and I was making a pilgrimage and would not be improperly attired. While my personal arming scene would not have been adequate for Achilles or Arnie, I still made sure my personal panoply was properly in place: jungle boots, cargo pants (because pockets), appropriate shirt, cardigan (because to mine own self be true), and long traveled umbrella. I descended northward before the sun could produce a shadow, inching ever closer to the cache of caches. But before I could meet destiny, I would have to conquer the wilds of…