We saw off the last of Kansas this morning and entered flat dry farming land of drought plagued eastern Colorado. Signs along the road reminded us that we were, and had been since St Louis, pretty much tracing the route of the original Santa Fe Trail the southern most route by which settlers traveled into the West. This trail brought many settlers to what is today New Mexico and was then Mexican territory and eventually precipitated the Mexican-American war. In the hey day of the trail one of the few outposts of supply and security was Bent Fort, a fortified adobe trading post built by the Bent brothers and a son of a French nobleman a few miles from todays town of La Junta. The fort burned down in 1849 but was rebuilt in the mid 1970's as a historic monument and filled with historic artifacts and is today staffed by Park Rangers and volunteers in period costumes. We spent a pleasant, though hot, few hours there enthralled by the fort structure and the old tools and other implements. An interesting point of trivia was a discussion with one of the staff about the word Arkansas, which of course we all now know to pronounce as Ar-kan-saw. However it seems (or at least we were told) that when the state of Arkansas joined the Union its two Senators differed on their pronunciation of the word. One used the now accepted pronunciation of Ar-kan-saw while the other called his state Ar-kan-sas. Soon after statehood was granted the state legislature adopted the Ar-kan-saw pronunciation as the officially correct form. Just to confuse us foreigners apparently many people from Kansas still call it Ar-kan-sas.

After the fort visit we ventured into La Junta looking for the premises of Terry Lee Enterprises, the name of the business owned and operated by Rob Pickering the Unimog expert we had come to spend a few days with. No address or searching was necessary though as a large sign and a parking lot full of various models of Unimog trucks and a variety of tracked off-road vehicles almost jumped out to meet us.

Edwin, the sole employee on duty when we arrived, got us settled on the workshops parking lot for the night with a key to the shop in case we needed to use the rest rooms. Rob arrived a little later from a trip to Denver and with introductions done we were all primed for the work to start next morning.

PS The observant reader will note that in photo number 2 the steering wheel of the truck is on the wrong side of the cabin. We stopped at a rest area this morning and moved the steering wheel (through the magic of the Unimog Vario-pilot system) just to check that it worked.