August 31
I woke up when that airplane took off again, and I stayed awake when Chrissie got in the shower and left in her car.
I was kinda eager to go but at the same time I didn't want to leave so I just stayed in bed and dozed a little bit while I waited for Peggy to wake up.
When she did, she wished me a good morning and then went off to take her shower and I went downstairs to make breakfast again but there wasn't any pancake mix left 'cause I'd used up the last of it. And there weren't any boxes of unshelled eggs, so it would have been really hard for me to make omelets especially since I didn't know where the knives were kept.
There was cereal, though, and so I poured each of us a bowl but I left the milk out of Peggy's 'cause if the cereal sat in it too long it got soggy.
She came downstairs before too long and she made coffee and we ate breakfast and then we went upstairs and made sure that I had everything in my saddlebags including my new pilot's hat, and then we brought them down with me so that I'd be ready when Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn arrived.
I saw the newspaper that had my picture on top of a pile in the recycling bin and I asked her if I could have that, too, and she said I could and wondered why I wanted it. I said I thought it would be funny to show Mister Salvatore if he hadn't seen it yet.
We'd just put that in my saddlebags, too, when John came downstairs, rubbing his eyes and he went right into the kitchen and came back out with a cup of coffee and he looked more awake. He said that both of us were too chipper for this early in the morning.
He said how much fun it had had to have me visit and he said that if I wanted to come out to Colorado for Thanksgiving they'd be happy to have me. He said that he'd even make me a tofurky, which was something that I'd never heard of. And Peggy said that there was usually snow up in the mountains and we could go snowboarding on real mountains if I came.
So we talked in the living room until I saw Mister Salvatore stop in front of the house in his Dodge Ram, and I hugged Peggy and John and I said that I was looking forward to school starting again.
I sat in the middle of the back again, between their bags, and once we left the airport behind we passed by another military base and then we were out in the prairie. There were a few houses and farms here and there but mostly it was just prairie land as far as I could see.
I think if I couldn't have flown I would have really liked it. When I looked out the back window I could still see the mountains off in the distance, but it was mostly open and just the perfect place for a pony who had to stay on the ground.
Mister Salvatore slowed down when we go to a town called Punkin Center and he said that he wasn't sure if the people who founded the town couldn't spell, if it was a joke on travelers, or if it was named for something else. There wasn't much of anything there, so there wasn't anybody to ask.
We went across railroad tracks just before we got to Aroya, and then our road ended and we turned onto the 40-287 Road, which went more south and also ran alongside the railroad tracks.
After we'd been driving for almost two hours, Mister Salvatore said that we'd take a little break up ahead to stretch our legs. And I looked through the windshield and didn't see anything up ahead but he had his GPS so I thought it knew that something was coming up.
When he slowed down, though, all I could see ahead of me was a few run-down looking buildings and I didn't see anything that looked like a restaurant or a rest area or a gas station. And instead of going to them he stopped along the side of the road and I looked around but all I could see besides the buildings was a trailer with big water jugs and an arvey with its nose missing and then I saw the green sign by the side of the road that said this town was called Wild Horse.
Miss Cherilyn just glared at him, but I hopped out of the truck and stood by the sign so that Mister Salvatore could take my picture, and he finally convinced Miss Cherilyn to get out, too.
There wasn't anywhere to eat and there were big semitrucks zipping by—one of them saw us at the sign and honked at us—and so once he'd taken a picture with her and me and had her take a picture with me and him, we got back in the Ram and drove on.
We stopped a little while further down the road in a town called Kit Carson, who Mister Salvatore said was a famous cowboy. I asked if he'd built the town, and Mister Salvatore said that he didn't think so.
It was a big enough town that it had a restaurant called the Kit Carson Trading Post Restaurant and we got some strange looks when we came in. We picked a table kind of in the back and Mister Salvatore sat right next to me.
When the waitress came she said that it was kind of strange to see me there because the creek right behind the restaurant was called the Wild Horse Creek. I asked if there were wild horses in it and she said that they used to run alongside it, which is how it got its name but that that was a long time ago.
I thought it would be fun to see wild horses and Mister Salvatore thought it would be fun to take a picture of me in Wild Horse Creek and Miss Cherilyn though that if we kept stopping every time Mister Salvatore wanted to we'd never get to Wichita.
He said that getting there was half the fun, so it ought to take half as long as being there. And he promised that we'd get there an hour sooner than she expected, and she said that crossing into a new time zone didn't magically make another hour appear. And then after our drinks came she remembered that since we were going east, we were going to lose an hour, not get another one.
He said sometimes she thought too much about the little details.
I had a salad and a slice of cherry pie, which was very good. The waitress said that the pies were homemade, and that there were also peanut butter cookies that were homemade and very good and she gave me one to try and I shared it and Mister Salvatore liked it so much that he bought a whole box of them for the road.
Once we were done eating, we went out behind the restaurant and I flew down alongside the creek—it had a big, wide bed, but there was hardly any water in it at all—and Mister Salvatore took my picture and then he wanted to take another one of me looking wild, so I used my hooves to mess up my mane some and stuck some leaves and branches in it, and he took a picture of that.
Before I could take the leaves and sticks back out, a bird landed on me and pecked at the stick, then flew off again. And Mister Salvatore got a picture of that, too. I didn't think it was a good picture 'cause I was kind of cross-eyed trying to look up at the bird but he insisted that it was the best picture ever and Miss Cherilyn agreed.
Then we got back in the pickup and went back out onto the road and after a while of it being almost all plains as far as I could see I started to get a little bored, and wondered if I could crawl out the back window and ride in the open bed of the truck. Maybe if I was holding on to a rope, I could fly along behind it like a kite, although I wouldn't be able to go too high because the rope would probably hit wires.
There was just a little blue sign to tell us that we were in Kansas and nothing on the other side of the sign was any different than it had been, and I dozed until we stopped at a gas station so that Mister Salvatore could put gas in the truck. Me and Miss Cherilyn went inside and walked around a little and used the bathroom and when we got back to the truck Miss Cherilyn asked him if he wanted her to drive for a little bit but he said that he'd be fine.
We got on the 70 Highway and we could go a little bit faster, plus it was more interesting since there were lots of other cars going the same way so I could look at them for longer. We passed a house on wheels, which was pretty amazing. Mister Salvatore said that they built them in factories and then took them where they were going with trucks, and that some people really liked that because you could buy one and have it delivered in a couple of weeks rather than waiting months or years to have one built.
We had to slow down at WaKeeney because they were fixing the road, and then traffic almost completely stopped for a while. There were helpful orange signs that told us which lane we had to pick, and most people obeyed them but there were some who rushed ahead and cut the line and after five or six had gone by, one of the semi-trucks that had gotten in the correct lane went back over to the wrong one and he just stayed there, blocking everybody else. Mister Salvatore laughed as cars started to line up behind him wanting to get by but they couldn't.
Once we got up to the front of the line traffic speeded up again, and I watched out the window at all the different machines that worked on the road. Some of them I'd seen other places like the big scoop tractors, but a lot of the other ones I'd never seen before. There was a tractor with a spinning broom on the front of it that was making a really big dust cloud.
After we got out of the construction, it took a few miles for the traffic to all find its place again, and then we were back up to speed.
We stopped for dinner in Salina, and Mister Salvatore wanted to go to the Rib Crib but Miss Cherilyn said that I wouldn't like it at all. And she said that there was a sushi restaurant that I might like.
I did want to eat there but I thought we ought to go where Mister Salvatore wanted because he'd been driving all day and so he deserved to eat what he wanted. Then Miss Cherilyn suggested that we could go to the sushi restaurant and he could eat ribs by himself and she'd even let him drive the truck over there so he'd feel more manly and just to come back and get us when he was done eating.
He agreed to that pretty quickly, and it was nice for us, too. I had a seaweed salad, smoked salmon nigiri and a hamachi sashimi, and we also each had one mojito and then green tea. And we took our time with dinner and sipping our tea until Mister Salvatore finally came in to get us. He was really cheerful, so he must have had a good dinner.
We went south on the 135 Highway until we got to Wichita, which was the first big city I'd seen since we left Colorado Springs. Then we drove through town until we got to the Marriott hotel, and we had rooms on the very top floor.
It was strange to be so tired after I hadn't done anything but sit almost all day long, but I was. I was kind of sore, too, so I filled up the bathtub and soaked in it for a while and that loosened up my muscles. Then I sat crosswise on the bed so that I could look out the window and preened my wings and looked around outside.
There was a strange figure-eight of highway that pointed to the hotel, and then I could see to the east the end of a small runway, but I saw airplanes taking off not very far to the south of me and I wasn't sure why there would be two airports that close together. And when I checked my watch for what the nearest airport was it didn't point me at either, which was even stranger.
I couldn't think of any reason why there would be so many airports that close to me, until I found a visitor's guide that the hotel had put in my room and I found out that there was an Air Force base and also Cessna and Beechcraft which built small airplanes and also an airplane research facility and I started to get excited because I bet I was going to get to visit an airplane factory.
It was a little lonely being in a hotel room all by myself and the bed was too big for just me, so I took some of the blankets and put them on the chair and slept on that instead.