Wednesday, June 07, 2006

Flat as a Pancake



PLUS



EQUALS




We're on the road again, tonight from Hays, Kansas.
We must not be near Oz though since I don't see
any flying monkeys. YIKES! Wouldn't THAT be blog-
worthy!
We're on our way to visit my parents, just
south of Chicago in Northwest Indiana. It's their
50th wedding anniversary this week and the whole
family will be there to help them celebrate.

Today was enjoyable, but really long. We started
out by saying goodbye to our friend Ang, who was
on her way to Cedar City, Utah to visit with more
Ice friends, Kim and Justin. We had a fun time
driving through the mountains. Most of the snow
is now gone and although construction season is in
full swing, traffic rolled along smoothly. We listened
to some tunes on my iPod that were either really cool
or really dorky and got to enjoy the emptiness of the
Plains. Due to a serious overestimation of my driving
ability it took seven hours to cross Colorado and we
fell three hours short of my goal of making it to Topeka.
Hence...the stop for the night in Hays, Kansas. Lynn
looked out of our hotel window and stated, "Not much of
a view". I laughed because even if our view wasn't a
parking lot, we're in Hays...not much of view from any
window. Although the people are nice and the town is clean,
there's not really a vista to be had here. It's 825 miles
from the nearest ocean and 367 miles from the nearest mountains.
The word that best describes Hays and most of Kansas for that
matter is FLAT. How flat you ask???

According to the Guardian Newspaper,
"three geographers compared the flatness of Kansas to
the flatness of a pancake. They used topographic data
from a digital scale model prepared by the US Geological
Survey, and they purchased a pancake from the International
House of Pancakes. If perfect flatness were a value of 1.00,
they reported, the calculated flatness of a pancake would be
0.957 "which is pretty flat, but far from perfectly flat".
Kansas's flatness however turned out to be 0.997, which they
said might be described, mathematically, as "damn flat"."
Therefore...this proves that Kansas is actually flatter than
a pancake.

On the whole...I still enjoy driving across Kansas more than
I do driving across Nebraska...but that's just a personal
preference.

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