On Thursday morning, I finally rolled out of the Ozarks and into Kansas. I spent a couple hours on a long, straight, flat road that was a little like heaven. When I saw the “Welcome to Kansas” sign, I was overcome by an elation that almost moved me to tears. Oh Kansas. Sweet, flat Kansas.
I stayed the night in a hotel on a strip mall in Pittsburg, Kansas. This hotel used to be a Holiday Inn Express, but apparently Pittsburg, Kansas is not hot enough to warrant an HIE any more. This seemed about right, since it was largely composed of the aforementioned strip mall, which featured such gems as Wal-Mart, and a drive-through Starbucks. I walked around the strip mall, cutting through parking lots and across grassy dividers because, of course, there was no sidewalk. People gave me really weird looks, as though walking indicated some sort of psychological disease. I purchased a bottle of the finest “champagne” the liquor store offered: the $12.99 special, some fresh fruit from Wal-Mart (luxury!) and spent the evening watching retarded cable shows in my hotel room in celebration of my arrival in Kansas.
On Friday morning, I dragged myself out to the laundromat and washed all of my clothes, which had developed a nasty case of wet dog smell due to days on end of intermittent drenchings. The weather the entire way across Missouri, and so far in Kansas, has been pretty awful. Right now, as a matter of fact, I am sheltering in a Subway restaurant in Yates Center, Kansas, through which I have been forced to detour due to impassable flooded roads. It poured all night, all morning, and doesn’t look like it’s letting up. I keep hearing people say such things as, “I ain’t seen this much rain since the ‘51 flood.” But I digress.
Despite the inclement weather, I made it from Pittsburg to Chanute, Kansas on Friday afternoon. I pulled into town as the sky was growing dark, suggesting another downpour was imminent, so I was happy to find a hotel right in the middle of town. The Tioga Hotel was great — located in an old-fashioned building on Main Street and featuring a bar and restaurant in the lobby. It was rough around the edges in a charming way that I have been sorely missing in all of my strip mall motel misadventures. The doors opened with real keys, and the doorknobs were cut glass: that sort of thing.
It turned out, bizarrely, that Chanute has a pretty rollicking nightlife. Apparently the Tioga is the town’s gay bar. Which is not to imply that the clientèle was exclusively, or even mostly gay. I met a good number of manly men who wanted to tell me all about the thousands of dollars a week they earn by virtue of their union membership. And about their sweet truck that they’re getting custom painted at an astronomical cost. I learned that there is a job that involves walking out along the lines of underground pipes to check them for corrosion. The job does not entail fixing the pipes; just finding any problems. There is also a job building the cabinetry for Chuck-E-Cheese’s. Who knew? I stayed up far too late (midnight — ha!) which I might have regretted, but as it turned out it was still raining steadily at 8am, so probably just as well that it’ll be another short-ish day.
Posted by: sam