We’ve been enjoying our driving break in Salina, Kansas. First of all, Kansas is beautiful. Yes, it’s flat, but then again, it’s not. The landscape has a lovely texture created by gently rolling hills. Fields may have crops or critters, usually cows, but sometimes pigs or horses. Small ponds, clusters of trees & shrubs & prarie grasses dot & color the scenery. It creates variety & is not at all boring to see. I know I had a preconceived idea of what I believed this region of the country would look like – I’m happy to write that I was wrong.
Kimi has become our resident photographer. She went out & aroundthe campground, Sundowner West, yesterday as the sun was starting to go hang low on the horizon. The soft light was perfect for her shots of the lake, picnic area & many, many resident white geese. When I can connect to the internet, I’ll download the photos so that you can see them, along with photos from today’s outing.
When we woke up this morning & lifted up the shades on the east side, we saw cows grazing in the adjoining field, the sun not quite above the hill. Very pretty.
Three miles down the road from the campground is Rolling Hills Wildlife Adventure, a zoological park & museum. We visited the zoo first. As it turns out, schools around here started up for the new year this week, so we were practically the only visitors – it felt like we had the place to ourselves.
We tried to get there before it got too hot (temperatures were predicted to get into the 90’s) to be able to see animals in motion. This worked out for us quite well. We could hear the male lion roaring before we saw him – he was in a mood! The primates were fun to watch. There was a capuchin monkey island where they busied themselves climbing & jumping. The giraffes were playing with each other by wrapping their long necks into & around each other. When Shaun & I approached the leopard area, one of the leopards looked at us, growled a grumpy complaint, got up & walked over to a shadier area.
The quieter animals include the wolves, tigers, rhinos, & wallabies. However, they were still laying where we could easily observe them.
After lunch we walked next door to the museum. We almost skipped it – it sounded a little...um…boring. How wrong we were! It was filled with huge dioramas of animal from many different geographical regions, along with animatronic “humans” of the time or region “talking” about that time or region. I know this sounds rather ho-hum, but we all loved it.
As if all this wasn’t enough, after we left Rolling Hills, we drove a ½ hour away to see something called Rock City. Existing 2½ miles southwest of Minneapolis, Kansas, is a group of concretions, spheriod masses of rock. At one time, the surface of the land was higher than it is at the present & the rock occupying this space was sandstone, a part of the Dakota sandstone which is the dominant bedrock in this part of Kansas. The sandstone was crossbedded & the individual grains of sand were loosely “cemented” together. Underground waters containing dissolved calcium carbonate circulated through the porous rock, leaving deposits. These deposits clumped up large enough to create large rock masses that could have eventually become one enormous rock, but instead experienced erosion from wind & rain. Now there are approximately 200 of these formations in Rock City, the only place in the world with such large samples of this geologic oddity.
The amazing thing is, visitors are allowed to climb on these huge rocks, which we happily did! Again, once we can upload photos, you’ll be able to see what I’m trying to describe.
Busy day, fun day. Tomorrow (Thursday) it’s a long
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