After growing up in MO and spending early adulthood in Eastern KS, I was never much impressed with the landscape. I longed to live in the mountains or near the ocean. Now that I'm considerably older AND I’ve found the joy of traveling at bicycle speed, I appreciate the beauty of the wide open spaces and the interest of the local flora and fauna.

"Church of the Great Outdoors", yep, that purty much sums up how I feel when I'm riding. I like that. May have to borrow it!

Told you it was deer or antelope "playin".

Oh yes, I've definitely noticed that several times.

Right, and I did say I just wanted to see a tornado from afar. As you know, big objects (like a tornado) can be seen from several miles away on the Kansas plains.

Yes, I should have identified them by number for more clarity.

I'm just getting over being humiliated after that alfalfa/wheat debacle yesterday, and now this? Actually, in this case I was just joking.

Yes it's beautiful. It's just different from other types of scenery. The open plains has it's own type of beauty. It can also be pretty harsh though, and demands that you respect it.

You'll always see them next to the railroad for easy loading to transport the grain. And you can spot them 15 miles before you reach the town - seriously - once you spot them while riding, note the time, it will be an hour to an hour and a half when you finally reach them via bike.

Should be a good route. I cycled through Dodge and Garden City - chilled out in Patrick Dugan's Coffee Shop in Garden City for a bit, your route passes within a block of it (should you want internet and a pastry/coffee break you can't go wrong there). BTW, has anyone mentioned that the wind blows in Kansas? It's always good advice to start early in the morning on a tour, but maybe even more so in Kansas.

Others have said so in their own way, so I won't go into great detail (for me anyway), but I feel compelled to say that you really DON'T want to see a tornado up close. If you do, you will realize that whether you live or die is merely a matter of luck as the tornado whips erratically over the ground surface and may or may not cross over you - it's a terrifying experience that I hope you miss. OTOH, in my days as a young Geologist working on drilling rigs in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandle areas, there were times when we were drilling on a high spot and could see for many miles all around - and in the summer it wasn't unusual to see funnels form and drop from the clouds in the afternoon, most of which never reached the ground - seeing one of those from 5-10 miles away is interesting, and perhaps you will get that experience. But if the funnel makes it to the ground and is near you, well then it's just the luck of the draw and you are powerless against this monster - the sound alone will give you nightmares for some time to come. It's not a pleasant experience.

I can just see your neighbors enjoying coffee and gathering at the window to watch the spectacle of the crazy guy next door riding a bicycle circuit in his driveway - well done indeed!

"Perhaps I'd be less carnivorous if I had to chase down a cow, pounce on it, and tear into it with my fingernails and teeth."

Maybe so, based on my limited experience in doing such. In my youth, immediately after college, I helped my wife's grandfather kill and butcher one of his cows. I was instructed to shoot it in the head with a 22 caliber rifle - one of my wife's brothers and I cornered it by the barn and I did just that, but I guess I didn't know the right spot to shoot it, so I just upset it real bad and it ran one way around the barn - we cornered it again and I repeated the execution technique, and this time it ran the other way around the barn - this was beginning to look like a Elmer Fudd cartoon - the 3rd attempt did the trick. Then we drug it using the tractor to a tree where - I'll spare everyone the unpleasant details of dismantling a cow - it's not a high point of my youthful memories. Eventually we got things to a point where I was hand-grinding sausage in a cement block shed used for butchering - even when I was young and relatively strong, that was tough work! Three of us took turns, about 15 minutes each was all you could manage before being too exhausted to continue, then you got 30 minutes rest until your next turn. Butchering a cow by hand was hard work - that was circa 1976. Some years later I became a vegetarian and remained so for 11 years - that was probably the healthiest time of my life - I only resumed my meat-eating ways because of my wife's complaints that I was too hard to cook for (I always told her not to worry about me, I'd just eat whatever didn't have meat in it, but she felt it necessary to prepare special vegetarian dishes for me anyway). From an environmental perspective, we will all need to move away from eating so much meat - we will be forced into doing so as we grapple with the reality of increasing population and declining water supply.

Are you sure these are cows? Look more like deer or antelope, maybe playing on the range?

Rain pants are multi purpose-Keep out the rain, windproof and add a layer of warmth. 3 in 1, not bad.