Dodge City to Holly, Colorado.
Today was a long day, and after spending a few hours in Dodge City, Kansas, I wound up in Holly, Colorado for the night, in an interesting and run down but funky kind of hotel. Not for everyone, I’d say, but I’ll get back to that.
The driving has ben fine, even for these long, many hours drives (today I covered about 340 miles, maybe 6 hours of driving in all) , through Kansas, and Kansas is definitely flat (have I said before?), marked with grain silos and elevators in every town, running along the railroad. In fact, grain elevators ought to be the state symbol. I also saw lots of wind turbines along the way, but they came and went, unlike the grain elevators, which are a constant feature. It’s flat out there.
After a long and flat drive, I pulled into Dodge City… which is a great place to visit. It really is a major seat of the Old West, sitting at the junction of the Chisholm Drive, along which cattle drives brought thousands of head of cattle from Texas, across the Red River, to Kansas, and the Santa Fe Trail, a major trading route from Santa Fe, New Mexico to Missouri, cutting through Colorado and Kansas.
Wyatt Earp and his brothers were here, Bat Masterson, Doc Holliday, and other icons of the Old West.
Wyatt Earp died in 1929 at age 80. He did a lot of things, including being a boxing referee, and was eventually sort of active in early Hollywood as a consultant for early silent cowboy movies He’s buried in the Jewish cemetery in Colma, just outside of San Francisco, with his wife, Josephine, who was Jewish and who died in 1944.
Bat Masterton died in 1921. He also did a lot of things, and at the time of his death at age 67 was a sports writer and columnist in New York city for the Morning Telegraph newspaper, which went out of business in 1972. Wow, huh?
And let’s not forget Marshall Matt Dillon.
The town is pretty nice, once you get to the residential neighborhoods, with nice houses, some of which go way back and have historical significance. In the “old” days, I might have considered staying here for a while, and getting a job. The history is mostly represented on the main street, what used to be front street, where all the action was back in the 1870s and 80s, and behind the boot hill museum is a replica Old West street, including the famous Long Branch saloon (and, apparently, Miss Kitty performs there in evening shows). I would like to have stayed a while in Dodge, even though I had to turn in my six guns at the edge of town, but already had booked my hotel for the night in Holly, Colorado, and had a two hour drive ahead of me. As it was, I stayed till around 6 pm.
Dodge City railroad station is also right there on Main street, as iconic a western symbol as you can imagine. It’s really loaded with history, and the original Harvey Girls dormitories were there, and the Fred Harvey hotel, from way back when when the station depot was built in 1898.
In front of the railroad depot are two giant sun dials. One is set for Mountain time, and the other for Central, and the dividing line between the two time zones goes right through the middle of the two dials.
Dodge, and Kansas in general, really was the dead center, so to speak, of the cattle business, and still is, with cattle auctions here weekly. The cattle yards here, where cattle are "processed" (and not for their green cards) are vast, with as many as 45,000 head of cattle. In those yards, which are massive and go way back into the distance, what look like dots in the distance are actually cattle, waiting to get to the "right" weight before being slaughtered and processed.
But the king of the cattle are the Texas Longhorns, which originally came from Spain. You can easily see why they’re called long horns.
I took the Dodge City trolley tour, which lasted about 75 minutes, which went around town as well outside of the town, going into Fort Dodge, one of the army garrisons built to protect the settlers from the Plains Indians, who at some point got fed up of these interlopers, but to no avail, as we know.
And finally, I got out of Dodge, stopping to take a few more photos of the town and its streets.
After getting out of Dodge, I headed west. I know I’ll see many more as I travel, but I love those long lonesome trains you see all over the west and southwest, some I think must be over a mile long. Years ago, when I lived for a while in Gallup, New Mexico, you could wait for over 20 minutes at the railroad crossing in the middle of town when a freight train was going through. And more flat roads, all the way to Colorado.
And then, about 2 plus hours later, moving into mountain time, I reached Holly, Colorado, and my hotel for the night.
Holly wasn’t what I was expecting, although I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting. But not this. It was difficult to find a hotel in this area, including just east, in Kansas. These towns are small with little amenities. Holly is truly a one horse town. There are three small restaurants, and a movie theater, but it’s only open Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. It is showing Deadpool and Wolverine, though. 😊
But best of all was my hotel.
First, it took me almost 10 minutes to locate it. Oh, there was a run down old hotel, that said "Hotel" and nothing else, but where was the Holly Suites Inn, which I'd booked? Well, it turns out, although perhaps they didn't want anyone to know, that run down old hotel, looking pretty derelict, and I wasn't even sure it was actually open, was the Holly Inn Suites. Sheesh!
As I walked up the stairs, I still wasn't sure it was the hotel I'd booked. But it was.
I actually came to like it within a couple of minutes of being upstairs; it was funky and not at all run of the mill, with its own character – which was dilapidated, but western. It had a charm, just like my room, but odd and 1 star. Maybe 1-1/2 stars, as I’ve actually stayed in worse.
Kathy, the manager, was something else. Very friendly, and very Texan, she proceeded to talk to me for 35-45 minutes straight, telling me about her failed and abusive marriage, the deaths of her children from overdoses and suicide, raising her five now young adult grandkids, the hauntings and ghosts of dead women and three children in the hotel (that’s always a selling point for a hotel), her diabetes and leukemia, which she does not believe she has despite being diagnosed, spiritual encounters with others, and her plans to walk as far as she can for God, with no other plans, starting sometime in September. I told her I’m on a drive for Bev (which, of course, is true), and she wondered if God had brought me to the hotel to meet her, as is has been the case for many others.
She was actually very nice, if a little crazy, and I enjoyed talking to her. She has character, like the hotel. I finally was able to interject, at a pause, and say I had to go wash up. Phew! All this time, my room was immediately behind her, as we were in the hallway; so close, and yet so far.
My room, “The Tall Texan,” was equally run down, but with character… until I found some dried dog pooh in there. Obviously hadn’t been cleaned very well (although that seems like an understatement). Kathy cleaned up (it had obviously been there for a while, and was dried up), and like the stalwart fellow I am, checking the sheets as best I could for bugs and the like, I went to bed.
An odd arrangement. A coffee maker, but no cups. A tall desk, but no chair. A TV but a remote that didn’t work. An unopened roll of toilet paper, but no toilet paper dispenser. An overhead light, but no bedside lamp, so you can see where you’re going after you’ve turned out the overhead light. But, the dog pooh added that finishing touch.
Would I stay again? I’d have to say no. 😊
