They get into the Kansas they expected, dreadfully boring and flat, and the one they found instead: the Flint Hills, a sunrise that lights one patch of prairie gold, and a Fourth of July in Ford where a man they had just met waved them into the town potluck and then offered his house for a shower. A chain of Kansans, Carol and Carolyn and Debbie and Pastor Mike and Joyce, passed them house to house. "People are good," Rhiis says. "I didn't know that before this."

They crossed into Colorado the week this episode went up, their tenth state.

Recorded by Kathy Holt of the Historic Old West Hotel in Cimarron, Kansas. Photo by Lynn Boitano, High Plains Public Radio. Maps, guides, and Gaia GPS data for the American Discovery Trail at hikingamerica.com.