Thursday, April 2, 2009

Austin to Emporia, Kansas

We were on the road this morning by 6:45, heading out of Austin, leaving Texas, not returning for probably six months. It's hard to be on this side of the trip. I don't like it. I tried to take in the beauty of the scenery around us, but it seemed less beautiful on the way OUT of Texas ... after all, there are 15 family members in the giant State of Texas ... how did everyone get so far away?
It took us roughly five hours to travel up I-35 through Ft. Worth, north to Oklahoma. We traveled on to Oklahoma City (I think I was sleeping through that part).
Oklahoma is very pretty, and we had a beautiful day for travel. But with each mile, we were getting farther and farther away ... and my heart was sad about it.
It was extremely windy all day and it felt rather ... cold! In fact, I believe this is the third year we have been in Texas during the month of March and this was definitely the coolest year so far. When we were over in El Paso, it did get up into the 80's and it actually felt hot ... but Corpus Christi was cool and we really only had one day in Austin that I considered warm in the least.
Our goal was to reach Wichita before stopping today. But we actually drove about an hour further to Emporia, arriving in the early evening. We talked to a gentleman in the lobby of our hotel who had been in Topeka earlier in the day and encountered such a snowstorm that he said he could barely see two feet ahead of him on the highway! I did read a little paragraph about Emporia in our AAA tour book. Emporia's claim to fame is that in 1953 it was the first American city to celebrate Veteran's Day. Prior to that time, Armistice Day was celebrated, but it only honored WWI veterans. A citizen from Emporia proposed that the holiday be renamed in order to honor WWII as well as Korean War veterans, and the following year President Dwight D. Eisenhower (who also was from Kansas), and Congress, endorsed changing the name to Veteran's Day. I thought that was an interesting bit of history!

Tomorrow we hope to arrive at Adam and Emily's by early evening or so. We're looking forward to our visit with them very much.

1 comment:

Sabrina said...

praying for your safe arrival today!