Oklahoma City to Denver

First and most importantly: I'm starting to post pictures from our trip on my Smugmug site. Check out the album here. There's a permanent Smugmug link on the sidebar. Hopefully there will be frequent updates.

Yesterday after waking up relatively late and eating our free continental breakfast at the Days Inn (apparently in Oklahoma, "continental breakfast" includes biscuits and gravy, eggs, and waffles), we drove by the memorial at the site of the federal building in Oklahoma City. We didn't stay long, but I took a few pictures. We got out of Oklahoma City pretty quickly because we wanted to get to Denver in one day, and it's like 650 miles or something. From OKC, we drove northwest into western Oklahoma. The landscape changed pretty quickly from verdant, rolling hills (which I hadn't been expecting in Oklahoma) to less verdant farmland, although the badlands of the panhandle weren't as bad as I was expecting.



In the panhandle, we headed northward on Highway 83 into Kansas and ate lunch at a Mexican restaurant in Liberal (which probably isn't). Then we continued northward into Garden City, got kinda lost trying to get out after getting gas and pie, and drove east on Highway 50 to Lamar, Colorado, and northwest to Interstate 70 for the final haul into Denver. From Liberal the landscape changed from prairie to sagebrush and then finally to Denver's urban sprawl.

We'll probably be here a couple of days to recover from several long days of driving and the inevitable altitude sickness. Our original plan was to take about a week longer to get to Denver (via Taos and southwestern whatever), but we're trying to fit in more time in Seattle, Berkeley, and the ride back, so this is okay. And now we know we can get from Chapel Hill to Denver in three solid but not quite exhausting days of driving. This country is big. Really big. But not quite that big.