Trip to Gering Nebraska part 2

At Kansas City Missouri there is a choice to make. I can either go North on Interstate 435 and then take I-35 on up through a part of south west Iowa – cut across to Nebraska City and over to Lincoln and then take I-80 west or I can continue across on I-70 and go across Kansas. It has been a number of years since I have driving across Kansas so I elected to stay on I-70. My first surprise was just outside of Kansas City, Kansas I-70 is a toll road. The good news is this toll road goes south at Topeka on I-470 on to I-335. That means it does not cost a whole lot and the rest of Kansas I-70 is free. Kansas ended up being a great place to test Trapster on the iPhone. Trapster is pretty easy to use while driving. It brings up messages about where the police are located with speed traps and where it is common to find speed traps. With the iPhone mounted on the windshield Trapster only takes a couple screen presses to enter or verify a speed trap. The screen will show messages as to where others have reported speed traps. An interesting thing is Trapster puts information up on my Twitter site.

I-70 in Kansas has only low to the ground Billboards and they are not lighted at night. Must be some sort of regulation. That means that driving across Kansas at night it is dark except for towns and of course headlights.

Somewhere west of Salina Kansas at night was something that was at first puzzling. There were hundreds of red lights up in the air, on some sort of towers. All of these red lights would go off at the same time and come back on at the same time. So what you see while driving is hundreds of red lights spanning miles and miles come on and stay one for maybe 10 seconds and then they would all go off at the same time and come back on again maybe ten seconds later. They all seemed to be North of I-70 and none were close enough to the interstate to actually see what they were. Imagine red lights all across the entire windshield – hundred of red lights up in the air on some sort of tower spanning miles and miles all turning on and going off at the same time.

I drove on the Hayes Kansas, found a hotel and even though it was late – around midnight, I got my laptop out in an attempt to understand what the lights were. Turns out what I was seeing was a very large windmill farm – each of the hundred of towers with the red lights was a windmill used to generate electricity.

Good for Kansas!! They are generating electricity by using windmills – hundreds of windmills. Maybe more states will start to do more of this. I think that what I was seeing was the Smoky Hills wind project

Tags: electric wind turbines, Hayes Kansas, Kansas, Salina Kansas, Smoky Hills, Trapster