May 29 - 30, 2024 - Lafe and Faith's Odyssey

Kansas, big and small

We awoke early on Wednesday, May 29th to finish packing up and get everything squared away for living in a van for the next few months. We didn’t have much left to do, but I was definitely a bit anxious that we had forgotten something important. After bidding another fond farewell to my parents, we hit the road towards our first stop: Kansas City, MO, where Jeremy, a good college friend of ours, lives. The drive down was uneventful and went by quickly aside from one stop so Faith could succumb to a nap attack. We met up with Jeremy at the unfortunately closed Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, so we headed towards downtown to get some food. Although we were in a nice area, you can apparently never be too careful. While walking on the sidewalk past a group of high school girls, a car full of the same demographic stopped, one of them opened the door, pulled out a Glock, then proceeded to unload it into the girls on the sidewalk. To be honest, I thought our great adventure had come to a premature end. Fortunately, it was just an airsoft gun, and the BBs bounced harmlessly off the group of girls and Faith. We promptly left that area and went back to the art museum, where we poked around the grounds and got caught up on life. Once done, Jeremy led us downtown, where we used the free street cars/trams to explore a bunch of areas, including a very authentic Chinese market that both looked and smelled the part. As evening approached, we again said our goodbyes and set our next destination to Cawker City, KS.

If you haven’t heard of Cawker City, I wouldn’t be surprised, it is a town of about 500 people in north central Kansas where there aren’t really any towns of notable size. Will, a childhood friend of mine was called to be a pastor for a rural church, and he is certainly filling that role in Cawker City. We arrived after dark and talked to Will and Kat, his wife, for a while before getting some shut-eye.

Now, I’ve driven across Kansas before, and when I think of central and western Kansas, it isn’t exactly the prettiest place in the world. It’s brown, flat, boring, and featureless, consisting of range land, grain fields, and the odd farm. However, when I got up the next morning, I was surprised to find that this area of Kansas was quite pretty. There were lots of trees, rolling hills, numerous farms, and some small bluffs that gave the area a not brown, not flat, not boring, and not featureless look. After breakfast, Will and Kat introduced us to Alice, their adorable 14 month-old daughter, then gave us a tour of the surrounding area, which includes the world’s largest ball of twine, a movie set, and the geographic center of the contiguous 48 states. In order to keep their title as having the largest ball of twine, visitors are allowed to add twine to the ball. Since the ball is quite large, people have continuously added twine to the middle of the ball as they cannot easily add their twine to the top. Consequently, the center has bulged outwards in a way that will one day make it the world’s largest ovoid of twine. After having seen the sights, we got some ice cream and headed back to Will and Kat’s house to change for some outdoor adventuring.

The small bluffs I mentioned earlier are owned by a family that goes to Will’s church who had given him permission to poke around the land. So, we headed over there in Buck the truck to bounce down some dirt roads before getting out and doing some more exploring. The bluffs offered excellent views of the surrounding fields and towns and quite an astonishing array of cacti, flowers, bushes, and trees. As for fauna, Faith caught a horny toad, and I nearly caught a large wolf spider and scorpion that jumped out of a cow bone I picked up. We decided to leave those creatures alone, finished up our adventure, and returned to their house for dinner, fellowship, and one more new thing. Will has many hobbies and interests, the biggest of which is probably blacksmithing. He has a small forge, an anvil, many tools (some he made himself!), and a variety of scrap metal for whatever project takes his fancy. He took the time to show us how to create metal S-hooks that we could use for hanging items in our van. We went through the cycle of heating the metal then hammering on it until we could curl the ends of the bar, bend it around, and rotate it to create some pretty twists. Voila! We had brand-new S-hooks that were straight metal pieces just a few minutes earlier. After we were finished, we left the hooks to cool and went to sleep once again.