Heavy rain overnight, drizzle most of the day today.  We gassed up, got coffee, and headed north into Iowa.  Our first stop was in Clarinda, where my father, Don Parkins, lived from 1917 until the late 1920s.  My grandfather, Bill, worked at a tire and battery store.  He had a motorcycle dealership in Jackson, MN in 1914, but moved the family to Shenandoah in 1915 to work as an auto mechanic, and again in 1917 to nearby Clarinda.   At thirteen, in the winter of 1927, Don delivered the Clarinda Journal, a twice-weekly newspaper.

The town was larger than I imagined, the Page County seat, with the business district in a square surrounding the magnificent courthouse.  My dad had written that the town was hit with a tornado in 1926 that destroyed 30 homes and damaged businesses, including the KSO radio station.  We chatted with an older woman in the antique shop about the town history.  She recommended a bakery down the street; the cinnamon rolls were very good.  Then we were off toward the freeway, 100km farther north.

All day we passed road signs pointing to towns where my Wartburg classmates had come from, more and more as we got closer. Interstate 80 took us east to Des Moines, and Interstate 35 took us north (signs for Minneapolis, 300km).  But, we turned east again at U.S. 20, toward Waterloo, then north toward Cedar Falls west of Waterloo.  Finally, we merged with highway 218, a familiar route, but there were no 4-lane roads when I was here last, 50 years ago.  Waverly, too, was unfamiliar until we reached the old bowling alley, then the intersection with highway 3.  The hole-in-the-wall diner where we went for egg and cheese sandwiches in the middle of a long study night was still there, under a new name, but the corner tavern across the street was now a memorial park.

The college campus, too was familiar, but not familiar, with many new buildings and reconfigured streets.  We found our lodging without too much trouble, having searched for the clues with Google street view a few days ago.  After unpacking the car and chatting with our hosts, we went for dinner at The Dirty Dog, a sports bar recommended by them.  A build-your-own pizza satisfied the vegetarian requirement, and Judy selected the BLT, a favorite of hers when the veggie guy isn’t cooking.

Rain started us off, drenching us on the run from the car to Cup of Jo-Nes coffee shop in Dodge City.  The rain stopped, but the headwinds continued unabated for a second day, prompted frequent fuel stops.

The above photo proves that the cattle drive is alive and well yet in Kansas after 150 years.  Nowadays, of course, they get a police escort across Interstate 70.

We only made a short run on the Interstate, past Abilene, getting off near Manhattan and driving country roads up to U.S. 36, which led us across the tip of Nebraska and across the Missouri River into the State of Missouri and back into familiar civilization, with Starbucks coffee and Panera bread near our motel.

To Kansas we went

Texas and Oklahoma

winds blew in our face

We said goodbye to Starbucks yesterday in Ruidoso, NM, with none expected ahead for a few days. Clovis has the Java Loft, where we stopped this morning on the way north to intercept U.S. Hwy 54, which would take us deep into Kansas, across the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles. The New Mexico plateau gave way to the Great Plains in a spectacular drop off  a mesa topped with wind turbines.

The highway passed alternating massive feed lots and cattle-feed crops, following the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe rail line toward Topeka and Atchison, directly into a stiff prairie wind.  Gas mileage suffered: we topped off the tank when we left Clovis, and again in Dalhart, arriving in Dodge on reserves.

We stopped for lunch in Guymon, OK, no thanks to the GPS:  the business directory predates the recession, and the Midwest was hard-hit, wiping out many of the restaurants and motels in small towns, some of which have resurfaced under new names, and the towns that haven’t disappeared entirely have expanded beyond recognition in the recovery, so the services aren’t even close to the locations of the ones in the database.  We found a café with all-day breakfast, and a few offerings without meat.

In mid-afternoon, we turned north to Dodge City, pulling in to Cup of Jo-Nes coffee shop just before closing to get on WiFi to make lodging reservations and find a laundry.  Judy’s older iPad has increasingly refused to connect to WiFi networks in motels and coffee shops other than Starbucks, but it did connect at the laundry.  It’s going to be a long two months, with marginal computing connectivity.  The big laptop is behaving once again, thankfully.

A trip to the grocery after doing laundry made it a day.  The grocery is called “Dillon’s,” so we surmised that, after Marshall Matt retired and settled down with Miss Kitty, they started a small grocery…  Or not: Marshall Dillon was a fictional character on television, but based on the real Marshall, Wyatt Earp, for whom the main thoroughfare is named.

We packed up and loaded the car just as the roofers came to fix the leak we discovered our first night at the casita on the farm.  A stop for coffee in town, and we headed east, with plans to stop a few places on the way.  First stop was the overlook at San Augustin Pass between the San Augustin and Organ ranges.

We decided to see if the missile park and museum was open at White Sands Missile Range (WSMR), where I had been stationed 48 years ago while in the U.S. Army*.  The visitor center and museum were closed on Sunday, but the gate guards issued us a pass for the missile park, and we walked in for a brief tour of the collection of missiles and range instruments.  The captured German V-2 rocket is now housed in a separate building that is part of the museum, so we weren’t able to see it.  It may or may not be the same one that was in the park 48 years ago, exposed to the weather.

Another 50km across the missile range on U.S. 70, we pulled into the White Sands National Monument and did a drive-by of the dunes on the park road, then back on the highway, with a lunch stop in Alamogordo and a coffee and fuel stop in Ruidoso.

By now, it was getting late afternoon, and we pressed on across the eastern plateau, bypassing Roswell, through Portales, to Clovis.  Motel Row in Clovis is next to the train tracks and downwind from a feed lot, but we’re getting used to trains and farm smells.  There will be more over the next few weeks on the road.

*My job at WSMR was as a radio frequency interference analyst, resolving conflicts between civilian and military use of the radio spectrum to make sure civilian use didn’t interfere with range safety communications and tracking radars didn’t interfere with public safety communications in New Mexico and southern Utah.  The perfect job for a Private First Class trained as an infantryman–or not–but, I had four years experience as chief engineer at an FM broadcast station, a bachelor’s degree in Physics, and six months training in computer architecture and programming before being drafted, and did some intense self-study of antenna theory and radio propagation theory my first couple of months on the job.