Sep 7 Day 22

Where are Tom and Lennie Now? - Click here for our current location !

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Day 22 started with a cold front that was working its way across Denver and to the east. The front brought a 20 degree drop in the high temperature forecast between yesterday and today! They were also calling for some severe thunderstorms along our route to the eastern portion of Kansas. Fortunately, the large storm cells had passed Denver and were moving toward the east by the time we were ready to hit the road. So, we got lucky and got to trail behind the storms as we made our way through the remainder of Colorado and across Kansas. The only real issue we had to put up with were the high sustained winds, and even higher gusts. They made keeping the bike in our own lane a little challenging.

Not a lot of photos from today, as traveling across Kansas is pretty boring. Lennie did get this shot, perhaps it's the Kansas version of....

the Lone Cypress in the Monterey/Carmel area :) What???? Don't you think the backdrop is as nice??

Lennie also captured the Kansas Welcome sign. Nothing very exciting, no little state catch phrase, pretty lame, I give it a 2 with respect to effort.

We did pass a huge area of large windmills. They were along a 15-20 mile stretch of road, and stood as far as the eye could see. A little research revealed that Kansas has a lot of these wind farms (makes sense with the kind of wind they have out here). The farm we saw is known as the Smokey Hills Wind Farm. The farm covers over 20,000 acres, and produces 250 Mega Watts, which is enough energy to supply roughly 100,000 homes. There are close to 200 windmills in this area. The size of the units is pretty impressive. 

About half of the units are made by Vestas, and the other half are GE units. The Vestas units have blades that are 130 feet long, giving the mill a 260 foot blade diameter. Each blade weighs about 3000 lbs. !! There is also a huge hub/control room, where the blades attach. The whole unit sits on a tower that is about 270 feet tall. Pretty impressive when you see hundreds of these lining the highway. :)

Below is a photo of a truck carrying one of the hub/control rooms for a wind mill. You can see in the photo above, how the blades connect to the hub.

Just a few minutes behind the previous truck, was this one carrying a section of the post/base that makes up the windmill. It was so big, that it was not actually placed on a trailer, it was actually made into a trailer. Note how they just placed a couple of basic chassis parts with wheels under the rear of the tower, and made a bracket that connects to the tower and hooks right into the king pin of the tractor. Pretty slick setup. Must be pretty heavy, I count 36 wheels on that rig, assuming the rears are double on each axle like most trailers.

Tomorrow we will make our way from Junction City Kansas, to Effingham Illinois.

Today, we traveled 477 miles from Denver Colorado to Junction City Kansas. This brings the trip total to 5527 miles. Below is a map of the route from today.