Day 3-Colorado Springs

The only downside to the motel is the weather channel which is not THE WEATHER CHANNEL. It's 6 am and I notice that my hair is wet as I'm loading the bike. I clearly didn't dry it after my shower. Wait a minute, I showered last night. It must be raining. The local weather channel shows a bad storm on either side of I-70 through Columbia. Since I can't see farther than the local weather, it's time to check things out for myself. Wrong guess. Here doesn't come the sun. Man, the liquid is coming down and I have two poor choices. If I stop, I'll hit Kansas City right at rush hour. If I keep going, I may not live to see KC and the lightning is bound to give me an afro. I make a decision. Right on! Bear with me on this one. If you plant a tree, and then another, and another, at which point do you have a forest? Now, if you lay down one tar snake, and then another, and another, and keep doing this until they are on top of each other, what do you form, a snake farm? Whatever is formed, this experiment is taking place in west Kansas. The snakes are so high that one of them slides me over 9 inches in the rain. This is stressing me out. My Darien is also leaking so that now I'm cold and wet. At least it is also windy. In KC the weather starts to clear. By that I mean it is not raining anymore, but still overcast and cold. Traffic is inching through the construction east of town, but is moving. In another hour this place will be a parking lot. I'm glad to be through and on to the toll road. Was this here before? I-70 shouldn't be a toll road. I'm paying for the suburbanites who live in Kansas, but work in MO.
The plains are the plains and look very similar from town to town. You can easily get lost as each small Norman Rockwell town looks like the next. The only difference is the size of the grain silos. The people I meet are down to earth (go figure) and very friendly.
High school age kids are polite and personable. I don't hear one yo-yo-yo. About the only part of the drive that is interesting is watching the altimeter change. The height is around 1,000 feet while Denver is the mile high city. Something has got to give.
Western Kansas and eastern Colorado make me happy. The sun is out and the sky is the best feature of the area. Montana gives me the same feeling. A small band of clouds frames the horizon in all directions and I feel if I can reach out and touch it.
I was going to stop in Limon, CO for the evening. My mood is good and it is early, so I'll run down to Colorado Springs instead. I'm off the interstate on Hwy. 24 and get a hint of the mountains which will appear in Colorado Springs. It's a quick ride and I'm ready to do some laundry and hit the hay. Tomorrow will be serious mountain time.