Ok... We were officially on our own today - the Tour left for Lincoln, Nebraska at 9:00 am, one of the shortest legs of the trip, while we started out at 6:00 am for the longest leg yet of our personal tour. We headed south from Ottawa on some Kansas highways, through a fair bit of flooded fields and side roads. Fortunately, none of the roads we needed were flooded. We decided to head towards West Mineral, Kansas, where I heard of a pretty cool attraction - Big Brutus. It's a HUGE electric shovel used for strip mining in the 60's and 70's... Who knew that Southeast Kansas had coal mines?
We then decided to see where the short stretch of Old US Route 66 was - turns out there were a whopping 13 miles of the old highway that ran across the very far southeast corner of Kansas. So off we went - and ran the whole thing... From Baxter Springs, through Riverton, and to Galena... Where by chance we took a wrong turn and ended up on the old downtown route, and found an old service station that had been bought and restored recently, so we had a neat photo op! And it turns out that this service station is where the "official" inspiration for Tow Mater (From Cars - the Movie) lives!
We then went to Joplin, and then south to Bella Vista to drop Dad off, but not before the requisite run in with the local police!!! Sometimes being nice to the officer will get you off with a verbal warning - I KNOW it wasn't my winsome charm.
I put the pedal to the medal, because our lollygagging around SE Kansas left me with precious little time to get home before my deadline, and I pulled into the driveway at 5:15 pm... Eleven hours of driving today! I'm done.
Click Here for Today's Pictures
Mileage for today: 483
Tank 1: 133 miles/7.25 gallons - 18.34 mpg
Tank 2: 228 miles/12.3 gallons - 18.53 mpg
Tank 3: 118 miles/6.6 gallons - 17.87 mpg
Total miles for the trip: 1541 miles over five days.... WOW!
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