Saturday, February 15, 2014

US50 Phase 1: Finishing up Missouri


Oct 11 Bailing on Columbus

This morning I got the heck out of dodge! (Well not really Dodge since I haven’t made it that far west yet but that’s more evocative than saying I got out of Columbia.) I was a little disappointed that I hadn’t found the perfect property and left there  wondering if north central Missouri may not be the perfect place to be looking for that perfect property. Makes me feel a little lost.

Maybe our standards are too high, or maybe our place in Texas, despite being far from family, is just setting the bar that high. Don’t know, but definitely time to give it a rest for a while and move on.

I made the trip back down to Jeff City to pick up US50 again and continued wandering west. I stopped for a while in the town of California where an Amtrak train blasted through a few feet from where I was parked. It’s a bit surprising to be going by these small towns in Missouri, both on the Kansas City/St. Louis corridor as well as Jeff City/Columbia and points north, and see Amtrak station signs, some of them in really small towns.

 
California is a cool sounding name for a town but there’s not a whole lot of town there, though it is within easy drive of Jeff City. In fact from Jeff City to right there at California US50 is a brand new 4 lane divided road cutting through what my map showed as farm land. Which of course means the area is now ripe for developers which means high prices and population growth, neither of which make for a good place to live.

I had a surprisingly difficult time finding diesel fuel in Sedalia which was otherwise a pleasant human-scale town halfway between Jeff City and Kansas City. And later I skirted around the south side of Kansas city and landed for the night at a campground I have used before in Emporia Kansas. Nothing to get too excited about with busy roads on two sides and the WIFI here is mostly useless, but it gets me on the west side of the heavy population area which makes it a good spot from which to launch my trek across Kansas in the morning. (Notice the upper crust grammar in that thar sentence?!)

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