Blowing up varmints

Meet Woody and Leon - prairie dog hunters. These guys are from Missouri, but drove about 400 miles to help a farmer rid his land of prairie dogs. They do it for sport, not getting paid by the farmer. They also shoot the critters from as much as 200 yards away. A prairie dog is about the size of a groundhog, so hitting one from 200 yards is really impressive. Woody showed me dozens of photos of blown up prairie dogs. They didn't just have holes in them. They were blown into pieces. Woody pointed out in one photo "here's most of him, there's another piece and there's the rest of him". I wish I had a way to show you his photos. Quite amazing. On the one hand, the varmints are kinda cute. On the other, I can see why their hole digging is a nuisance. I think I have to watch Caddyshack tonight.

I met Woody and Leon at the center of the country, as shown below:

I supppose midway between New York and San Francisco is as good a way to define the center as anything else. Woody, Leon and I were enjoying the Sod House and Museum here. They had to put the sod house inside a building because cows were eating it.

Sod houses were the original homes on the plains. There were no trees, so it was a clever way to build a home until lumber started getting delivered from elsewhere. There was plenty of sod. The settlers built special tools to cut out brick size chunks of sod. Very practical, but it must have been tough to bolt on the sattelite dish.

We also visited Pawnee Rock.

The rock only stands about 50 feet above the ground around it, but it was the most recognizable feature of the land for many miles. Wagon trains used it as a kind of navigation beacon to keep them on track. One wagon train traveler wrote that he saw buffalo as far as the eye could see from the top of Pawnee Rock. That must have been incredible. Now you see lots of wheat, with a few grain elevators to break up the view.

We did a very mellow 88 miles of riding today. Still traversing very flat farmland. On the one hand, the flats are pretty easy riding. However, we're doing so much of it that it's tough on the body. You're constantly doing exactly the same pedalling, with no variations in effort or position on the bike. We have a few more days of it, then have rolling terrain for the rest of the trip. I'm looking forward to a change. Then I can complain about the hills.