Endless weary prairie.

The Santa Fe Trail is the oldest and most interesting highway in America. Rather should it be said that the pioneers over what later became known as the Santa Fe Trail were the first to leave permanent marks on routes that have since become "highways" between the Central-Western and the Far-Western States. In the days of the ox team and prairie-schooner, the plains and mountains were crossed by trails, usually along the lines of least resistance, keeping as close as possible to bases of supplies and water. Travel over the Santa Fe Trail began about 1822, starting from Little Rock, Arkansas (pronounced Arkansaw), and following the Arkansas River west. A few years later, this trail was superseded by a more permanent one going west from Kansas City (then called Westport) to "Great Bend," a base situated, as its name implies, on a great bend of the Arkansas River, and thence to Santa Fe by a choice of two routes. An important trade with the Spanish population of the south-west was early developed, reaching its zenith in the '60s. This route, the one which I followed, has now been marked a considerable part of the way by stone monuments erected by the " Daughters of the American Revolution " and constituted the chief inroad from the East to the Far West.
--C.K. Shepherd

The Santa Fe Trail is well marked along highway 56, and we followed it from Missouri through Kansas.
There are several places to pull off and see the ruts left by the thousands of wagons headed west, and we did pull off, but it must take a trained eye to distinguish the trail.
Kansas is pretty enough, but there is an awful lot of it.
The winds were unrelenting. The first day they came from the south, hot and dry and threatening to blow us off the road. We spent the night in Dodge City, but the closest thing to a saloon was the Appleby's, which was a disapointment. The next day the wind came on like a switch had been thrown, this time from the north, dropping the temperature considerably.
As we crossed the Colorado border, it stopped. The "welcome to colorful Colorado" sign seemed like a bit of an unfair dig at their drab neighbors, but it proved accurate.
Around La Junta, we started heading south for New Mexico.

"Before me lie 500 miles of perfectly flat and uninteresting country before I leave the State of Kansas and enter Colorado. Then follow another 200 equally flat, equally drear, to be crossed before the Rockies loom into sight. Seven hundred miles of endless weary prairie, stretching always, everywhere, as far as the eye can see, with never a hill nor a dale nor hardly a tree in sight!—Nothing but boundless, illimitable corn, wheat and prairie."
-- C.K. Shepherd