Kansas - land of windmills.

21-DEC-08 - Made the front page... how cool is that. I took this photo a couple of years ago, my bike was brand new with less than 200 miles on the clicker when I left on this short journey.

The temporary paper license tag that I was issued blew off somewhere between my house and this photo. As I was taking the photo, I noticed it was gone and about shit myself. I was sure that I would get pulled over by some county yokel on a bike that was bought over the weekend so more than likely the paperwork had not hit the system yet.

You can tell by the rear wheel that I broke in my baby by doing about 10 miles of gravel on the way to Hiawatha. The lower cowl has never quite been the same since. Oh well, I bought it to ride. The kids' bicycles have done far more damage in the garage since then.

I took the same route back home in an attempt to find my paper license tag... no luck. Never got pulled over, but I did have to go pay for a real tag and missed out on my 30 days of free riding. The good thing is that once a certain amount of dust builds up... no more can stick. So the bike didn't look any worse after an additional 10 miles of gravel.

Windmill Lane is part of a small museum to the farming history of Kansas. All of the taller windmills are water pumping mills. The shorter windmills are all from the '20s and '30s, they are electrical generating mills that were popular on farms that didn't get onto "the grid" until the '40s, '50s and in some rare cases the '60s.

Kansas is still home to thousands of windmills... but now many of them are HUGE generating mills.