Interesting. Thanks for the set.
I haven't been there as an adult, but as a kid & teen my family drove through Topeka on I-70 at least a dozen times on long cross-country road trips. My main memory of it is how
different it feels depending on which direction you're driving.
If you're heading
west, you don't think about it much at all. There's only a half hour of country in-between the KC & Topeka suburbs, with Lawrence smack in the middle of that, so it really doesn't seem isolated or far or special. But ho-boy, things are different coming
east.
Coming east you spend hours and hours in the depths of the Great Plains, feeling (and being) in the absolute middle of nowhere. For
500 freaking miles between Denver and Topeka, you're lucky to get a Dairy Queen and McDonalds at any highway exit, much less anything that you could reasonably call a city. It's an entire day of driving. But then you get to Topeka. And small and dusty though Topeka may be, Topeka is a city. You get there and you throw your hands up in the air and sing a literal
hallelujah, because finally you've reached the first outpost of metropolitan America, of
civilization itself.
I am not exaggerating. Approaching Topeka from the west is an emotional experience.
tl;dr this is you arriving in Topeka from the west:
