July 13, 2001
Denver, Colorado — Kansas City, Missouri
Now this was a driving day. Even longer than our second leg, Montreal to Grand Blanc, Michigan. We had Kansas City, on the Missouri side, as our target, with all day to do it. And we needed just about all of it to get there. In some ways I wish I’d saved some of the context stuff, y’know the bug-scraping ordeals at gas stations, or stuff about postcards, something to give me a reason to fill more in on this day’s post. But the truth is, we just drove east on I-70 all day.
Most folks, when they think of Colorado, they think of the Rocky Mountains. Nothing wrong with that, it’s the most impressive and daunting stretch of terrain of our drive, and indeed of the country as a whole. I can’t even imagine what it was like constructing those freeways, or the roads preceding them. To say nothing of transportation before the automobile. But the east side of Colorado is flat. Like, totally flat. I *can* imagine that freeway construction. I’ve seen it in every flat place I’ve ever been, before and since. For five hours, including crossing into Kansas, we drove mostly in a completely straight line.
I don’t know anything about Kansas. I didn’t then, and I haven’t added much to the ol mind palace over the twenty years afterward. Bob Dole was from Kansas, and we drove by his hometown of Russell, but that’s about it. We stopped at Hays, which I’m surprised to learn just now had almost 20,000 residents back then. We stopped at Arby’s, presumably tired of McDonald’s by now, and got the requisite roast beef. I feel like we ate it in the car, as I don’t have any memory or any notes of anything else.
Four more hours sent us past Salina, Topeka, the state capital that’s a good trivia question for anyone not from Kansas, and finally into Kansas City, Kansas. Weirdly, the state line between Kansas and Missouri runs literally down a street south of the Missouri River. State Line Road. It’s hard to miss. But it’s super weird to be in one state on one side of the street and the other on the other. Anyway, we kept going past the Missouri version of Kansas City, out past the baseball and football stadium complex, and out to a Wal-Mart.
The only thing we’d even somewhat seriously considered doing was a stop at Prairie Dog Town, a Wall Drug-style place, it seemed, given the dozens of billboards along I-70. They advertised the world’s largest prairie dog, which it seems was a statue of some kind. It appeared it might be a cross between a glorified petting zoo and a Ripley’s Believe it or Not, so I can’t say I’m upset we didn’t stop. Though it probably would’ve provided some weird stories. It’s basically the only thing I wrote in my little journal for the day: “Prairie Dog Town (almost).” I’ll bet we saw the price of admission in a guidebook and just kept on going.
Once stopped, I had to make a phone call. And no, I did not use the cell phone. I must’ve had a calling card with a certain number of minutes prepaid, because I remember using a pay phone. We were at a Best Buy just east of Kansas City, and Wes and Win were inside buying some more CDs. The call I made was to my grandparents’ house in North Carolina, where they were hosting a family reunion. My maternal grandparents hosted Thanksgiving even before I was born, and it served as a reunion of sorts every year. When they moved to North Carolina, they continued this tradition. At a certain point it became easier for people to travel in the summer, with kids in school and everything else, so shifted to a Summer Thanksgiving, turkey and all. I don’t think we’d quite started that yet, but if it was that or just a standard issue everyone come to the house so we can all be together, that was happening just north of Charlotte.
This being my first time out on my own, it was also the first time I’d missed such a family gathering. I’m the oldest of my generation (actually on both sides of the family, both my parents are the oldest, too) so all my cousins were still little kids back then, and they were all there with their parents, my uncles and aunts. Extended family from the Norfolk area were around, and various other family members who could get to Charlotte. I was the only one who wasn’t there. And it weighed on me. I’d had such a good time on this trip that I hadn’t spent too much time wondering what was going on back at home, but this was different.
So I made the call, spoke with my parents, who then passed the phone around to anyone who was interested. It was a weird feeling being so far away, even if we were closer than we’d been in weeks. I’ve always suffered from FOMO (fear of missing out) and this was the strongest it’d been in my life. I wasn’t homesick, but for the first time I realized what that this trip included some sacrifice.
After that call, we got back together and hit another movie. This time it was The Score, a pretty intense one with Robert DeNiro and Edward Norton. We’d actually done fairly well on the movie front, now that I think about it, to say nothing of it giving us a/c and a few hours not in the van, which were priceless.
Church lot, campground, Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart was a pretty long stretch for sleeping in the van, so we planned to pay to stay somewhere indoors for the next one. But for now, it was easy sleeping after covering over six hundred miles back toward home.
