Baldwin City

I left Marion around noon, and walked through a hot day. Made it twenty five miles into Strong City, for the night.
The scenery is really changing, now. Out of the flat plains, the feed lots and cornfields, have risen rolling hills and copses of trees. There is an abundance of little streams and stillwater pools along the road, and the hills are green.
From Strong City I walked north, up through the Tallgrass Prarie National Preserve. Another hot day, but plenty of places to sit and rest in the shade. Eighteen miles brought me into Council Grove, where I quickly found the library, and then, after leaving, met Steve Hanson.
A man pulled up to the sidewalk and hollered at me from his truck, wanting to know where I was headed and what I was doing, and we talked for a while on the sidewalk, outside the barber shop. After a few minutes he introduced me to the barber, a younger man named Derrick, and shortly took us across the street to a little Mexican restaurant.
After eating we went back across to the barber shop, and I played a song on Derrick's piano, there, before some students arrived to take lessons.
Steve invited me to stay the night at his house, as we left the barber shop.
'You'd be more than welcome. I just need to run home and let my wife know that you're coming. I'll meet you back here in an hour or so.'
I sat outside the barber shop and listened to Derrick give a mandolin, and then a fiddle lesson, the music coming out the open door and into the street.
When the lessons were nearly finished, Steve came back up the street, and when Derrick closed the shop the three of us walked to Steve's house. His wife, Leah, a fifth grade teacher, welcomed me and the four of us watched 'America's Got Talent' before switching to CNN.
I stayed the night on the couch, and woke up early in the morning, but didn't leave town for a long time. After saying goodbye to Steve and Leah I ate breakfast in a little bakery downtown, then walked back up the street to the library and spent a few hours looking at an American Sign Language dictionary and reading Hilary Clinton's 'It Takes a Village.'
I didn't leave Council Grove until five o'clock, and only made it seven or eight miles before putting up my tent in the ditch.
The next day I started early. Walked through the little towns of Allen and Admire and ate a spaghetti soup lunch by a little creek. It took me until nine thirty in the evening to reach the town of Osage, and I slept beneath a timber town in the city park, a thirty mile day behind me.
Saturday I walked through Burlingame, and Scranton, and stayed near the road a little before Overbrook, and then yesterday I walked all the way into Baldwin City.

My spirits are good, on the whole. I feel motivated, feel like I'm making ground, and my feet aren't bothering me too much. But I've been getting a little bogged down, lately, by something that I can't quite place. It's kind of a spinning feeling, like a hamster on his hamster wheel, or something close. I feel like every day is becoming too similar to the last, like every town is too similar to the one before. The grocery stores and the 7-11s have somehow lost their glamour.
I think that this is in part because there are more towns, now, than there were before, and it's almost too easy to get from one to the other. The fifty mile stretches of nothingness are over, the careful rationing of water and jelly sandwiches is over, and the incredible, sometimes painful, sense of distance, seems over. It's not a constant feeling, by any means, nothing that's got me down, on the whole. Just something that's starting to creep in around the edges.