Whenever we have a rest day we wish we could just stay there. Hutchinson, Kansas was no exception. We couch surfed again, this time with a recently married couple, Sam and Cheri. Perhaps the most surprising part of the stay was that I ate something I hadn’t eaten since November, 2002: a hamburger. I’d say that freshman year of highschool was when I started developing an interest in the problems of industrialized foods when I saw a public television special on cow feedlots and slaughterhouses. Already having been bombarded with information on the unhealthiness of burgers, learning about feedlots and the associated atmospheric and watershed pollution (not to mention e. coli) caused me to give up burgers as a new years resolution. Eventually, veggie burgers became my barbequed food of choice, and for seven years I never considered eating a ground beef burger (Fast Food Nation could have also contributed to this).
However, on Sunday night, I ate a real ground beef hamburger. Why, you might ask? I’d like to say it was because of my dedication to food waste minimization, but they did also smell incredible. And, according to Cheri, the beef was “farm fresh” and safe enough to eat raw. So, there in Hutchinson, Kansas, I broke my seven year resolution. And it was worth every bite.
Yesterday we went to the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Museum and learned all about the history of space travel. It had a lot of really cool items on display, including World War II V-1 and V-2 rockets, a piece of moon rock, and space suits that have actually been in space.
Sam and Cheri cooked us dinner again last night. We polished off all of the sandwiches they prepared, of course, but not the seeds or rinds of the cantaloupe. Those, Cheri put in a tree outside for birds and squirrels to eat Not quite compost, but better than sending them to the landfill. After dinner, we went over to Cheri’s parents’ house next door for some croquet and conversation. By the end of the evening, it felt like we were old friends. Whoever invented couch surfing is a genius; our two night stay in Hutchinson exposed me to so much more of Kansas than I ever expected to see. I now have such a different impression of the state, an impression that most cross-country drivers never get to experience. Small town America and Kansas isn’t boring if you’re in good company.
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