Windy Cattle Pens in Kansas

Catching up on some of my older sets of photos and writing up posts about them.

My work has a thing every quarter where they invite remote workers into the main office for a few days. This is strictly optional if you're outside of some reasonable radius from the office. I decided to go to the one last spring since I had been working there for over two years and figured it was time to meet some of my coworkers in person. Plus even though Kansas sucks to drive across, I had never been to Oklahoma City, and it has been probably 25 years since I had been to Oklahoma at all.

Headed out a bit after lunch on Tuesday. Drive there was uneventful, noticed a sign for some cattle pens on the turnpike just west of Emporia, thought about stopping but by hesitated too long and made a note to stop on the way back if I was up to it. Got into OKC about 7:30, checked into the hotel, did some work from my laptop and eventually went to Raising Cane's for dinner, as there wasn't much else open at 9:30 at night.

Next few days of work was spent putting out fires and talking with coworkers and was rather enjoyable, to the point I'm probably going back to OKC this spring. Headed back home on Thursday, and it looked like I was going to run into weather on the way back.

I was not prepared for how windy it would be going across Kansas. My car normally gets around 40mpg on the highway if it's not too hilly and I'm not pushing it, but I was fighting so much wind that I was down to like 25mpg. And fighting it was exhausting. The clouds were moving so fast that it looked like a time lapse, and it convinced me to try to get a set up I could use for time lapse in the car without too much fiddling.

About the time I was tired of fighting wind, I was getting near the cattle pens I had seen on the way down, and decided to stop. The area is on the northern border of the Flint Hills area, the one place where Kansas looks nice, with an overpass over I-35. It looks like it's there mainly because the area is pretty. I wandered around for a half hour getting pictures and feeling like I was getting windburn. But it was worth it.