Rhiis and Sara are walking the American Discovery Trail from Delaware to California, checking water, camps, and road conditions as they go. Passing through southwest Kansas, they stopped into High Plains Public Radio in Garden City and talked with host Lynn Boitano for half an hour.

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.