Adventures in Kansas and Nova Scotia

I’d been wanting to get away from Lawrence for a weekend for a little while and getting a car made this a lot easier. I contemplated going to west Kansas as this was were the things I most wanted to see were, but I decided against this as I didn’t know what the car would be like and their was no mobile signal out that way. Instead I headed to a reservoir only a couple of hours west of me and where there was still mobile signal.

Things did not start that well. I’d identified a couple of possible camping places. One was a free place in a county park and although I found the park I could find no information on camping, or indeed anything else, so I headed to the second park I’d identified only to have a similar problem there. This second site was a State Park and I was used to state parks having marked campsites but, as I found out the next day, it would appear that some Kansas state parks do have “pitch in a field” camping. Unfortunately there was no maps available so I couldn’t even find the field!

I finally found somewhere to camp about one o’clock in the morning – a deserted Corps of Engineers campsite. I wasn’t even 100% sure this one was open or how much it would cost but as the gate was open I decided to just pitch anyway – I needed sleep! Next morning I struck camp as I didn’t want to leave the site unattended if I didn’t want to be there. I later found out that the site probably was open and as it was the off-season was also probably free.

I then went back to the first place I’d tried to camp the night before to do some hiking. I found the trail head and the start of trail but not much else. The land looked like it had been flood obliterating the path. After quite a lot of random wandering I managed to work out where the path must go and headed in that direction. I did eventually managed to pick up the path as it headed inland a bit but quickly realised that it wasn’t maintained any more and didn’t fancy my chances of following it so turned round and headed back to the car. I then did a couple of shorter walks in the park which were much better marked and more enjoyable.

By this time I’d started to get a headache so I decided to head into the nearest town to get some painkillers and then head back and find a campsite. I brought the pain killers and was heading back to the lake when I decided I was being stupid so I turned around and got a motel in town. I was in bed by seven with no dinner and slept to the next morning.

On Sunday I went back to the second place I’d tried camping again to go hiking. The park map was useless and I couldn’t really find the trail and took a guess walking along the shoreline of the reservoir. From the map it was obviously the path went round a bit of a gully and I ended up working my way up the small gully and succeeded in finding the path and a notice board with a reasonable map of the trail system. This notice board was in the middle of the system and no where near anywhere you could start hiking. OK, it was at a junction but I still think there’d have been better places to put it! I did a hike of somewhere around 7 or 8 miles before heading back to where there was phone signal. I phoned my mum for mother’s day went for another short walk and headed home.

And yes it is a Ford and yes, it is an estate (or station wagon in American speak). No, it is not gold.

It was rather an accident that it ended up being a Ford estate. I certainly wasn’t being that fussy about what I’d got. I had worked out that I probably wouldn’t be able to get even a half decent car for the sort of money I’d been hoping to so decided to spend a bit more. But even at that price my options were somewhat limited. I’d decided to buy from a dealer as a slightly safer bet having never brought a car in the US before and having done some research there was only one local dealer that seemed to get good feedback and sell cars at the right price.

As his lot was within walking distance I’d gone and looked at it a few times and he generally had cars around the price I was willing to pay. However when I finally had the money to get one and went to look he only had slightly more expensive cars. When I went back a few days later he had something a little cheaper on his lot… and it just happened to be a Ford estate, a Taurus to be precise.

I took it for a test drive and had decided to buy it when the “Check Engine Soon” light come on. As I was really wanting a car by this point I let him know that I’d still be interested if he fixed this and by the Monday he’d done so. Having made sure I knew everything that I needed to do with respect to registration and the like I brought the car. It was nice to be mobile again!

I finally got to climb outdoors! And it was no where near as awful as I’d been led to believe. Although that may have had something to do with it being a beautiful sunny day and being able to climb in a T-shirt. I went to a place called Warsaw with one of the guys from university and his friend. It was about a two hour trip to get there, and yes it was limestone, but it was totally worth the trip. By limestones standards the crag is relatively solid and it’s in a beautiful location on the edge of a reservoir.

Both of the people I went with climbed into the 5.11s (hard F6s / easy 7s) which was a bit hard for me but I still managed to second three sports routes. I managed two 5.9s with some resting on the rope and a 5.10a clean – guess what route suited my style better! I’d hope I’ll be climbing better than that by the time I leave the US but given I hadn’t climbed that much in months I was quite pleased with what I managed.

Unfortunately the uni guy I went with is also the most keen of the people I’ve been climbing with and he’s cunning managed to get teaching Monday-Thursday evening for the rest of the semester and the wall is shutting early on a Friday. Oh well at least now I know the nearest climbing isn’t as rubbish as I’d been led to believe.

Well it took me the better part of a week to finally get a Kansas license. I had already jumped through the hoop of proving that I was in the country legally and with that letter, and several other documents in my hand I headed off the the test centre. My intention was only to take the written test as I wanted to make sure I had passed that before hiring a car for the practical test. I was far more worried about the written test than the practical test. By all accounts the practical test was pretty easy but I was worried that I might forget things like breaking distances and other numbers that I may have needed for the written test.

After about an hour of queueing I finally got to the front of the line… only for the computer systems to promptly go down. Apparently this was not exactly an uncommon occurrence but they had no idea how long it would be before it was fixed as it had taken anywhere between a few minutes and a day in the past. After another hour or so of waiting around I got fed up waiting and headed home.

The next day found me back at the centre and I randomly got the same woman again. This time the system was working and I got to take the test and, thankfully, it was not too difficult. The only real interest came with the question “What does this color sign mean” which would have been fine on a colour print out but on a black and white photocopy was rather more interesting. Thankfully there was only one answer that made sense for other reasons but I can only imagine the confusion it had caused people in the past.

That done, I hired a car and a couple a couple of days later headed out to take the practical test. By coincidence I got the same woman again and by this stage I think she just wanted to see the back of me as she gave me a couple of hints such as making sure I stopped at the stop signs in the car park and when parking at the end of the test not to pull through the parking space. The comments I’d had about the test being easy were true and the only feedback I got was that I was swinging a bit wide at corners – something which I was already aware of myself and can only put down to being on the wrong side of the car. The test did make it rather more obvious to me why you saw some atrocious driving on American roads!

Within 5 minutes of the test I was involved in an accident. Most definitely not my fault – someone drove into the back of me when I gave way (or yielded) when they didn’t expect me to. To be honest I suspect I wouldn’t normally have gave way but I was still in cautious mode after my test. If it would have been my own car I wouldn’t have even swapped details as there was no obvious damage to either car but as it was a hire car I thought it best to take at least some details in case I’d missed something. Why we were doing this the police drove past which prolonged things a bit as they swapped our details more formally. Oh well it all got sorted in the end.

Well nothing much exciting happened for a while there. I went indoor climbing once. There were five of us which made for an interesting journey as the climbing wall we went to is about an hours drive away and I was sat in the back both ways. Really that appears to have been the most exciting thing I did for a couple of weeks.

One of the PhD students in my lab defended his thesis on the last day in January or to put it another way the last possible day he could without having to pay for an extra term’s tuition. He even managed to get all the paperwork etc done as well, although I believe it was a close run thing. He was not happy at having to answer the same question for three different organisations finishing surveys and all of which had to be completed before he was officially done. A defense serves the same purpose as a viva back home although the format is slightly different. It normally consists of an hours presentation followed by about an hours worth of questions by their committee. Lucky gits I’d have much preferred that to the three and a half hours of questions I get. Although, bizarrely, their supervisor sits on the committee and helps decide whether they get a PhD or not which I find a little odd given the potential conflict of interest. I doubt I’d have liked that aspect so much given the sometimes rocky relationship I had with mine.

Anyway after his defense we all went all for food and then back to one of the professor’s houses. Needless to say things all got a bit drunken and I didn’t leave to the early hours. I then went into uni as I hadn’t expected to not go back to the office between his presentation and drinks and wanted to pick up my laptop as I had plans to call my parents the next morning. Oddly I bumped into my equally drunk boss in the office which was a bit off a shock to both of us as I don’t think even of his make a habit of being in the office in the small hours.

It occurs to me that I’ve not really said much about the students Mark has and who are also in his office. He had two PhD students who he is co-supervising with someone in herpatology. Jeet is the guy who’s just defended and appears to have gone from collecting animals in the field to spending all day in front of a computer. Why is quite beyond me. He also quite likes cat. That may be an understatement. If there was one thing several different people told me about Jeet it was that he likes cats. He also has his own website. The other student in my lab is Jamie, the one who had the “puppy” party and who I’m sure will get mentioned again as I don’t believe he will be leaving that soon.

And before anyone (Colin?) moans about me using the American spelling of defence I decided that as it was an American event American spelling made sense.