Elderly Couple Reach Kansas Relatives After 660-Mile Detour

A couple who drove back and forth across Kansas and Colorado for three days after prairie blizzards kept them marooned in their car nearly two weeks were reported safe with relatives Saturday, about 60 miles from where they started.

Orville and Nellie Obendorf, the subjects of searches in two states, showed up in northwest Kansas on Friday night.

They had been missing since they left a hospital Wednesday, ostensibly to complete their trip to visit a relative in southeastern Kansas. They apparently decided instead to return to Idaho, but made wrong turn after wrong turn for about 660 miles.

“I just kind of felt like I was driving in circles all day yesterday,” Gove County Undersheriff Ron Achilles quoted the 65-year-old woman as saying Saturday.

Obendorf, 71, was hospitalized in Quinter for treatment of frostbite he suffered on his feet while the Nampa, Ida., couple were stranded for 13 days near Norton.

He was transferred by ambulance Saturday to Hadley Regional Medical Center in Hays, where he was in stable condition, a hospital spokesman said.

Relatives arrived Saturday to make sure the couple would not stray again. “I’m not going to let her out of sight until she gets to Iola,” Achilles quoted Georgia Roberts of Iola, Nellie Obendorf’s sister, as saying.

The Obendorfs were en route to Iola when they became stranded March 22. Two blizzards almost buried their car, and they lived on Girl Scout cookies and diet sodas until a farmer rescued them on April 4.

After Obendorf’s frostbite was treated in Norton, in northwestern Kansas, the couple set out again for Iola, about 300 miles to the southeast.

They went the wrong way and ran out of gas near Colby, near the Kansas-Colorado line. A state trooper gave them some gas and directions, but they never arrived in Iola, and a search was begun.

Nellie Obendorf, the driver throughout the odyssey, apparently became disoriented again and drove more than 300 miles back to Kansas. They arrived in Quinter on Friday evening.

Relatives said that the couple had made the trip from Idaho to Iola through Denver several times before without problems, Achilles said.