Left out before sunrise. We decided not to take the toll road, it is about a minute difference either way. Not taking the toll road gets us off the Interstate at Emporia and then heading west to Newton. Stopped at the Newton truckstop for our first break. The old Red Roach/Red Coach motel is still closed. It used to be a Best Western before it locked it's doors.

Not too far after Newton a deer ran across in front of me. Not a near miss, but I did hit the breaks pretty hard. Nice rack. Lots of evidence of ones that didn't make it last night. Everything is still fresh that early in the AM. Not too far after that there was a dead skunk in the middle of the road, I missed it but it looked like BB was going to run right over it. No evidence that she did, she never saw it.

Cotton balers ... I saw a few heading west a few months ago and couldn't figure out what they were, they looked like a JD garbage truck. Then last trip we saw the round bales. This trip everything is being done old style, cotton pickers, wagons, etc. From what we saw last week, they were leaving more in the field than a farm produced in the old days. If it wasn't for the bales, I would have said it hadn't been harvested.

Machinery Link used to have a lot of equipment in Pratt ... I finally looked them up and they are out of business. They used to rent equipment to different parts of the county.

Pratt, KS was our fuel stop and lunch. Fuel was supposed to have been cheaper at Love's but it had gone up. I was down to 20 mile range this leg. As long as we were stopped, we had Godfathers Pizza. No tables so we sat on the curb for our gourmet meal.

This stretch of road varies between two and four lane. I should have dropped back to 60 mph on the four lane to make some better mileage. Looks like we will run 65 most of the trip and make almost nothing on the fuel. But we should still be in the plus by a couple of dollars.

After Pratt there must have been an accident. We met a huge group of cars just as we left town and then down the road there were fire, tow, police and emergency vehicles. The road was scraped up but either they cleaned up quickly or it wasn't that bad.

Another break at Love's, there isn't much for rest area's off the Interstate.

Fueled, ate and slept at Delhart. We could have gone further but we forgot to order permits for NM. Now BB says we also forgot to pick up AZ permits ... We'll see what we need for AZ. For NM we can not call to order until 8:30 so we are loosing two hours there plus we stopped two hours short.

Is nice to get off the road before dark. The first two places we wanted to eat at were closed on Sunday's so we went back to an Asian place we've eaten at before. The loaded baked potatoes are really good. Other stuff is too.

That was also are walk for the day. We parked on the street and didn't want to give up our spots. It was about 15 minutes each way, not sure that was enough to walk off a buffet.