Apr 25 - Alamosa Co to Liberal KS (and Oz)

NOAA called out precipitation west of me toward Utah and above me in Colorado. I have seen enough New Mexico so the only choice left was east toward Kansas. I know the stereotype of Kansas is flat and boring, but being of an open mind, I said why not. First order of business was to get over the last pass and get to Pueblo. There is a wind turbine tower plant south of Pueblo I wanted to find.

 It was 37 degrees out so I put on the heavy bike pants and an extra layer on top and the heavy BMW gloves. It was perfect and I did not get too cold. East of Alamosa is a huge valley with snow capped mountains all around it. Beautiful. I went over the small pass and down onto the flat part of Colorado to Walsenburg. I hopped on Rt 25 and went north. Everything took longer today, not because of slow traffic or anything. The states out here are huge so what I would guess took and hour or two, takes twice that.
I found the Vestas tower plant, and they sure have a big operation there. They have one turbine (Vestas) at the plant you can see from everywhere. Ironically, it is right next to a coal power plant and the coal plant is right next to a huge solar project (single axis trackers).

 Cola plants have huge piles of coal that the train cars continuously feed. Half the trains I see are coal trains with 100+ cars. The other half of the trains are double decker ocean containers. They usually have 3-5 locomotives in front and many times they have one or two pushers behind the cars.
I wiggled through he power plant back yard until I hit Rt 50 that would take me east. Before the interstate system, there were coast to coast roads (10, 20, 30, etc) and I assume this was one of them. The nice thing is these roads are pretty old and many have been either by-passed by the newer interstate or replaced. You see a lot of old gas stations and junkyards with old cars in them from all those years.

 I was surprised at how much crop growing there is in eastern Colorado. Seems like mostly melons, beans, and other "people food". It almost all needs some kind of irrigation and those huge tractors. I stopped by one that I could drive my motorcycle under (It could go even higher with hydraulic cylinders at each wheel to raise and lower it.
Rt50 goes forever so I thought a good target would be Dodge City, KS. Traffic was light and it was clear and sunny all day. Today I made it a point to not just blow through the small towns, but to investigate any that looked to have a downtown. This road was built next to the rail road tracks which were built in the late 1880s next to the Santa Fe trail that went from Independence MO to Santa Fe NM. They used to drive cattle up from Texas, eventually to the trains to get the beef to the coasts. There is still a lot of stockyards here and the crop is Milo, which they feed to the cattle. I stopped and asked someone what the crops I kept seeing were. He said people like it so much to look at that they use it for their lawns.

In Garden City KS I found a wind turbine factory where they had hundreds of blades, nacelles, hubs and towers for turbines. And I saw a lot of turbines out here.
So Milo to feed to the cattle to make hamburgers, lots of trucks moving cattle around and I found the giant hamburger factor in Liberal KS.
I was pretty disgusted with Dodge City (Boot Hill Casino, yuck) and I had enough light to ride another hour and a half so I kept going south west to Liberal KS, right on the Oklahoma border. Nice long walk to a non-existent restaurant (thanks Trip Advisor), and then another walk to an actual existing one. 499 miles today so really beat.