An Improbable Ride Through America's Heartland, In The Name Of A Tough-Luck Baseball Team
“You road I enter upon and look around! I believe that much unseen is also here.”
-Walt Whitman, from Song of the Open RoadIn the summer of 1804, the first tandem team of American explorers trekked across a largely uncharted nation, passing through what would become modern day Kansas City, Missouri on a two year expedition from Camp Dubois, Illinois, to the Pacific Northwest. In doing so, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark became essentially the first of a prosperous line of American duos to traverse the continent, paving the way for a rich culture of eccentric pioneers to follow. A century and a half later, Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady burned across the same continent, wide-eyed and freewheeling to accept the offerings of small town America in a blossoming cultural epoch. Kerouac’s books that followed forever romanticized the act of cross-country passage, laying the foundation for a tradition of road trippers and every type of liberated wayfarer, and will likely continue to do so until the price of gas exceeds 8 dollars per gallon.
Now, 204 years after the first duo crossed the rolling plains of Kansas, I found myself compelled to tack my name to the bottom of the list of those who have voluntarily subjected themselves to the mercy of the road. Having seen the stretch of countryside whip by from the open windows of speeding cars to and from Denver to Kansas City over long weekends in college, I acquired a taste for the open air of America’s heartland, the tranquility of summer nights under skies of bright stars, local diners that time forgot, and above all else, a baseball team that has buried its head in the sands of the American League Central for the last twenty years. As my burgeoning interest in the Kansas City Royals blossomed into a full-scale obsession at the start of the 2008 season with the team making their first legitimate efforts to improve a spiraling reputation and reintroducing their powder blue uniforms of the prodigious 1980’s, I knew the time to act had come.
Here I saw the opportunity for the convergence of three storied American traditions. A tandem adventure hinging on teamwork and collaboration, a road trip through America’s heartland, and a pilgrimage to the ballpark at the peak of summer. How it came to be that I decided to do it all on a tandem bicycle, I may never fully remember.
Ad Astra Per Aspera: To The Stars, Through DifficultiesThe tandem bicycle has been around as far back as the early 19th century, as man came to the conclusion that walking wasn’t good enough, then furthermore, that neither was simply biking alone. Though frame strengths have improved in the last two decades to the point that cross country tandem trips are commonplace, like so many other niche sports, the learning curve has been gradual. Early model tandems were no more practical than the original big-wheeled penny-farthing bikes, cumbersome and irrational. In the 1970’s, as Americans sought progressively more ridiculous ways to spend their money, tandem bicycles became an easy answer. While a high quality tandem bike that might support the weight of two full grown adults across a distance of at least five hundred miles might cost in the neighborhood of four thousand dollars these days, older models are still circulating, collecting dust in damp garages, fondly remembering short rides around the lake on countless failed first dates.
To me, the very concept of a tandem bicycle in itself captures the essence of an American idea. While by most accounts it defies all practicality whatsoever, it offers an exclusive luxury with undeniable appeal. To share in the act of basic forward progress, to work together toward a single goal, united. To the untrained eye, the tandem bicycle may appear as graceless as the dodo bird, adding the additional challenge of having to cope with the general public’s absolute dismay toward the spectacle of modern ingenuity that is the tandem cycle. Like any great sport, tandem biking has developed its own limited vocabulary of terms, references to the aspects of the sport that set it in its own class. The front rider is often referred to as captain, as pilot, or steersman. The rear rider is known as the stoker, the navigator, or even rear admiral, for those riders with a keen enough sense of humor.
As soon as I’d secured my rear admiral in Sam Huntington, a dynamic and exceptionally nimble Denver-ite, the search was on for the right tandem cycle that might carry us the 600-odd miles to Kauffman Stadium, home to the Kansas City Royals since 1968. Though a world of knowledge awaited me, sifting off on the distant horizon line, I had but two requirements at the time: cost as little money as possible, and be blue. Sam found our match in a garage in suburban Westminster, where he liberated it for a meager 375 dollars following a successful test ride. After some basic tune-ups, we deemed our vehicle ready for success on the basis of nothing whatsoever other than its successful carrying of our weight for rides of shorter than twenty minutes. This would prove to be a journey of faith.
In early hype for the trip, we were fortunate enough to pick up the interest of Tom Kenning, a true visionary from Ouray, Colorado, who pitched an attractive proposition our way: in exchange for the sponsorship of our vehicle, riding gear, and personalized royal-blue jerseys, we would bear the insignia of Team Tom, a grassroots party of progressive thinkers based out of the western slope. On the conditions that we spread goodwill throughout the land and maximize any and all opportunities to have Tom’s name on our chests on live television, we received generous imbursement for the acquisition of top shelf gear. Namely, matching blue helmets, black spandex pants with padded butt-shorts, blue fingerless gloves, and cool bianchi racing hats, to make us bona fide.
We tossed around ideas for the jerseys, and how best to pay tribute to our boys in blue while upholding the name and signatures of Team Tom. We decided on a hand-drawn image of Tom’s spirit animal, the almighty Tyrannosaurus Rex, a creature many believe him to be a direct descendent of. Sam made it as menacing as possible, and customized our dinosaur not only with number 85, for the lone year the Royals captured a World Series championship, but a miniature #2 for our favorite player, the fleet-footed Joey Gathright, now famous for his ability to leap clear over parked cars and/or Japanese Dodgers pitchers. We decided on a name for our bike, Lil’ Philly, though nobody could really pinpoint how or why. Lastly, it was important we bear Tom’s trademark motto as well, a phrase that would, over the course of the journey, prove all too appropriate: Shouldn’t you have thought of that earlier?
We set forth from Denver on the 10th of July, bright eyed and generously weighed down, having equipped the bike with two large saddlebags flanking the rear wheel. On top of those, two large backpacks strapped down with bungee cords, teeming with sleeping bags, camping gear, baseball gloves, sunscreen, jackets, journals, spare tires, and a weird cornucopia of energy bars. The bike was hefty with our overzealous packing, and we struggled to accommodate the new weight as we took our first turns through the shade of downtown skyscrapers. We took our place where a bike lane should be but isn’t painted on Colfax Ave, the longest commercial street in the United States. As the downtown skyline faded behind us, giving way to bodegas, gunshops, and Popeye’s Chickens, the sweat began to fall.
Through a network of freeway overpasses and mystifying suburban offramp exits, we took a wrong turn leading us out of our way to a dirt road, forcing us to backtrack. We decided against good judgment to peddle up a vast freeway onramp, where we were promptly pulled over by a disbelieving highway guard. Turning us back yet again, he pointed to a dirt path beyond the railroad tracks that might lead us to the smaller two-lane highway we’d been searching for. Grudgingly, we hiked off the freeway with the bike on our shoulders, feeling the wrath of an afternoon sun as we high-stepped through parched bushes and onto the path. A half-mile up the trail, we found our road.
We rode a total of forty-five miles the first day, stopping in Strasburg, Colorado, where we’d already decided to allow ourselves the luxury of a mattress that night in reward for the distance we’d accomplished. Securing what would be the cheapest room of our entire voyage, we enjoyed two separate dinners at the only two restaurants on the single row of buildings “downtown.” Retiring to the motel as the sun fell below the distant Rockies, we yelled at the television as the NBA finals began, and fell asleep with our mouths gaping open, still short of breath and aching from the four hour opening ride.
Getting an early start the next morning, we limped downstairs to load the bike, and found the back wheel slightly crooked. It was slight enough to think we may have overlooked it all along, but I had a suspicion it was worsening as we took the snaking road further out of civilization and into the desolate prairies of eastern Colorado. Land opened into pastures, grain elevators sprouting up as the mountains faded out entirely into heat waves, rising off the summer pavement. Hills stretched out for miles, so that we felt the burn of lengthy gradual climbs, and urged the pedals down with difficulty, muscles struggling with what we continued to ask of them. As the hills wore on, we found ourselves twenty miles between towns, passed only occasionally by soaring eighteen wheelers, unstoppable giants that pushed us further toward the grassy shoulder. As the heat of day caught up to us, some thirty miles out of Strasburg, we realized the bicycle was doomed.
Five miles outside of Last Chance, Colorado, some eighty miles from Denver, we finished our last water bottle, and trudged slowly up another incline. Legs exhausted from the mileage, unsure of how much road remained, we climbed back up to coast a ways, and felt the wheel frame buckle underneath us. Eighty something miles from Denver, Lil’ Philly had rolled its last. Being the iron-willed navigator that he was, Sam took up post in the center of the empty highway, intent to stop a vehicle large enough that we might carry the bike with us to the next town, to survey our options for its repair or abandonment. Five minutes later, a pesticides truck came over the hill, and pulled over to the shoulder. Two minutes after that, we were in the back of it, bound for Last Chance.
Last Chance, Colorado is a town of 17 residents, at least five of them being under the age of ten and belonging to Traci Weisensee, the sympathetic schoolteacher that had seen us riding on her way out of town, and stopped for us when she saw Sam’s dancing. Tracie was amused at our notion of a “city” ahead, Last Chance lost its gas station years ago, and no longer lives up to its namesake as the last fuel stop to the Kansas border. Having picked up her fair share of hitchhikers, lost bikers, and American nomads, Traci, to our amazement, offered to drive us all the way to Limon to the nearest civilization some 40 miles south, and refused any form of reimbursement but for the promise that we return the favor someday. She dropped us at the South Side Diner, where framed pictures of John Wayne littered the cigarette-stained walls, and alligator heads sneered down from the top of an ancient bar. One hour later, after another huge meal, our waitress was involved enough with our story that she offered to drive us all 90 miles back to Denver that same evening, so long as we just paid for gas.
The next morning, waking bewildered in Denver, we set out to educate ourselves on our options. Locating a tandems-only shop on the far side of town that we’d never troubled ourselves to even notice before (see: shouldn’t you have thought of that earlier?) we wheeled the bike through the air conditioned doorway and pitched our story to an apathetic woman who makes a living selling 5 thousand dollar tandems to Denver’s elite. Among the racks of newly engineered, titanium alloy rimmed bicycles worth more than my head, we came to the immediate conclusion that our vehicle was a relic, a product of whim in the 1970’s, probably constructed to the soundtrack of “Get Down On It” by Kool and the Gang, as the builder repeatedly planted his face down into a huge pancake of Colombian blow. We were shunned from the modern cyclery, and sent packing to “Cycle Analyst,” where they dealt more intensively with prehistoric-era parts.
Sure enough, the owner of Analyst, and perhaps a direct descendant of Santa Claus himself, took a look at our frame and returned with a 48-spoke that might magically fit on our ancient drum-brake ensemble. We came to the crossroads then and there: to fix the old bike, and try again with the danger of crumpling a second wheel, surely the last of its kind on the Western Slope for a thousand miles- or abandon the dream of the tandem, for two individual bikes that would almost guarantee us our distance by our deadline of June 23rd. One brief argument with the rear admiral later, the wallets were drawn at the promise the bike would be ready that same afternoon. Claus delivered on his promise, and we mounted the bike to immense relief, riding home whooping and screaming.
With Lil’ Philly back in the picture, we came to the task of finding our way back to the scene of the breakdown. The next morning, with a rented budget truck illegally piloted by Sam’s license-less roommate, we jetted out to the Kansas border to St. Francis, where we unloaded the bike to the shoulder of the road and said our prayers for the second voyage, this time without the burden of saddlebags, or any extra weight whatsoever. A single backpack filled with one change of clothes, one extra jersey each, a small bottle of sunscreen and a journal would be all the precious cargo we’d have for the next ten days. We dipped below the horizon line, losing sight of St. Francis and the rental truck behind us, pushing cautiously down on the pedals. A few hours into the state of Kansas, we rode harder, newly convinced in our vehicle to carry our weight across the eternal plains.
O public road, I think heroic deeds were all conceiv’d in the open air,
I think I could stop here myself and do miracles. We arrived in Atwood, Kansas by early evening, coming down a large incline and setting a new speed record at 33mph, steady on our new wheel frame. We met with Mick at the “Motel It’ll Do,” where a white sign sits along the highway offering their motto: “It ain’t the Hilton.. but it’ll do.” Mick was a relatively embittered ex-Denverite, a one-legged golfer who sped around on his cart, kicking up dust and offering us beer from his teeming refrigerator behind his swivel chair. We asked for the cheapest room, and were given a double for the price of a single. Mick sped off again, back to the distant fairway by a small lake in the distance, and we set off to find the main street. As would be the case in most small Kansan towns, the main drag was host to a number of smaller than small businesses, a Mexican restaurant, a mini-theater that offered a single showing of a single movie per week, and an assortment of antique shops, all perennially closed.
We found our way to the municipal swimming pool, where we waited through an elderly women’s pilates workout class, until open adult swim. After a few failed attempts at throwing backflips from the deep end and a massive, inauthentic Mexican dinner, we retired back to the It’ll Do, to watch the Royals lose.
The next day we passed an army battletank outside a Sinclair gas station on the road out of Atwood, setting out on what would be our biggest ride to date. We would come to rest some thirty miles into our ride that day in Oberlin, Kansas: Where Friends Meet On Cobblestone Streets. This sounded good enough a place to rest and find some food, which we did at the Reload, a smoky restaurant adorned with antlers and dusty moose heads, strange chandeliers and young men with mustaches in heavy cowboy boots, who looked at our helmets and jerseys like they had their mother’s names on them. Before long we were finished, and napping in the shade of the gazebo in Centennial Park, a small plot of shaded grass behind an abandoned grocery store.
Getting back on the road reluctantly and lazy, for the first time on the trip I found my legs unwilling to continue, lethargic and empty of any will power as we took to the sloping hills. We had to walk the bike a great deal, wasting energy and complaining, until we settled on just riding slower, and quieter as the water supply ran low again. At the next town, a speck on the map called Norcatur, we rode a quarter mile out of our way in hopes of refilling our bottles. Coming to a dusty assortment of silos and empty looking farm houses, we found one sign of life in the Cardinal Café. Stepping through the doors into the fluorescent dining room, an elderly couple swiveled to take in our arrival, and one dumbfounded waitress stared at us with her mouth hanging open. Their soda machine had broken, but the waitress fetched a pitcher of water, which she clumsily began pouring into our plastic bottles when a raging red face popped out from the kitchen door and began screaming for her to stop. The chef, and apparent king tyrant of the Cardinal, then proceeded to chew me out for the next two minutes about how if “the state” were to catch them filling up our bottles in there, they’d be put out to pasture. While in any other condition than complete dehydration and drained mental health I might have said really anything at all, I accepted the wild man’s fury in astonishment and left, one and a half bottles filled with lukewarm and evidently highly illegal water.
We rode the rest of the distance in a hypnotic exhausted trance, as the hills continued to rise and fall, coasting down long stretches of farmlands, wild birds taking off from the tall grasses when they heard our approaching velocity. After sixty-seven long miles, we arrived into Norton, a town slightly larger than Atwood, but shorter on charm. The Motel 36 would prove to be the shoddiest of our entire trip’s accommodations, with ominous ketchup-stained walls and inflatable mattresses, which we may have noticed had we not instantly passed out into a death trance. Large bugs swarmed around the low green lamplight as we marched out for dinner, dragging our feet in search for a Chinese buffet. I began to worry for the first time that I might be asking my body for more than it had to offer, a concept I’d allowed no consideration for whatsoever. The water in the room was disgusting, I slept like a sedated baby.
Waking in Norton, we dragged ourselves from bed to sluggishly prepare for the next day’s ride. On our way out of town we encountered the first other bikers we had seen all trip. Nelson and Weston, a father/son team, were riding their way from Oregon to New Jersey, over the course of the entire summer. After charging through the Rockies in late May and camping out in snowstorms, these guys were exponentially tougher and far more severely farmer-tanned than we were. We would have crumbled entirely under the weight of their majesty had they not been so pleased to encounter two like-minded ambitious morons like ourselves, and on such an unlikely steed. They had been averaging roughly 100 miles a day, towing a small trailer behind them full of camping gear and basic necessities. They were just coming in for lunch as we headed out, so we said our farewells and peddled out of Norton.
Aching from the previous ride and starting later than we’d hoped, we rode about ten minutes before things started getting bad. The wind outside of Norton kicked up to 20mph gusts, as anyone familiar enough with Murphy’s Law would guess, directly against our angry faces. Our tempo was pathetic as we dragged through the relentless wind. Whereas we’d averaged 15-17 mph on our hottest paces in previous days, we were down to a dismal 9 mph, barely enough to keep the bike headed in a straight direction, and enough, when coupled with the slightest incline, to make me yell at the top of my lungs in frustration every 2 minutes. This wasn’t what I’d had in mind when I first imagined blasting across the flattened plains, corn stalks rattling in applause of us, wind at our backs. This was terrible, and again we had to walk the bike, marching uphill sweaty and furious.
By the time we got close to Philipsburg, a town we’d originally hoped to use as a halfway point, we were settled on staying, as dark clouds closed in on us from the north and the wind maintained its fervor. We had ridden for nearly four hours, and gone a total of 36 miles. While my borderline psychotic rage dissipated the moment we spotted signs of civilization, our bodies were worn down, spirits deflated. We pulled up to a Subway on Main Street, and left the bike. We would eat a total of four and a half feet of sandwiches by the time we left. Mid-feast, the door opened, and in stepped our friends from Norton, who had made noticeably better time than us, but were equally famished and jaded. We got to talking about the staggering amounts of food we’d been eating since we left Denver, and Weston blew us all away. What had they been eating, riding 100 miles a day from Portland, Oregon? Dollar menu, he said, with an evil grin. McDonald’s.
The men of steel left us in Phillipsburg, intent on making it another 30 miles before nightfall, as the clouds gave way to a decent afternoon. We backtracked a half mile to the motel Mark V, where we secured a room and enjoyed the 8 x 10 foot swimming pool, decorated with thousands of assorted dead bugs, and an inflatable yellow dragon. After our previous night’s accommodations, the Mark V felt like the Four Seasons, and we retired to scream at the television as the NBA finals rolled on. Bent on leaving bright and early to make up for lost mileage the following day, we called it an early night. The next morning, we parted the curtains, and found ourselves in a thunderstorm.
After a long deliberation regarding the pros and cons of a freezing cold rain-ride, we donned suits of black garbage bags and left Philipsburg behind. Whether it was due to morning calm or the freezing rain, the wind was temporarily at bay, and we made good time, streaking across the wet pavement and down a series of large hills, as nervous trucks flew by us, kicking up tidal waves of cold water. Anxiety pushed our feet down for us, and the rain provided a nice distraction to the mileage. We rested for the first time after nearly 20 miles. The rain let up on our second push, giving way to a mild sun in the late morning, as we said our farewells to Highway 36 for good and rolled into Smith Center, dripping and hungry.
The morning ride had been a success, a refreshing first half and reinforcement to believe the previous day’s wind resistance had been a fluke. After a long lunch, we set out South, with the wind at our backs for the first time. The difference was marvelous, we rode through a waving landscape of amber fields, farmers nodding from enormous John Deer’s, the sun burning down on our necks like a hard earned reward. After an afternoon set of another 30 miles, we rolled down the last of three massive hills into Osborne, a quiet town of more antique shops, (always closed) a municipal swimming pool, and a local diner. The diner consisted of an empty bar, and one loaded round table of WWII veterans, who, like most small town Kansans, observed us like a wildfire in their refrigerator. We’d become accustomed to telling our story, in varying lengths and with inconsistent enthusiasm, depending on our level of exhaustion or hunger, and we embarked on a particularly long and repetitive version of which that ended somewhere around the arrival of our food.
We were always given marginally more respect if the recipient of our story wasn’t aware of the nature of our vehicle. If we managed to get through the doors of a restaurant without being spotted on the tandem, it was assumed we were two rugged individualists, just friends looking out for one another on a cross country ride. Perhaps we were raising money for a cause, maybe just crazed athletes. Maybe we were heroes. However, for anyone new entering a restaurant with our bike parked outside, the shock of seeing two grown men dining together in identical uniforms was enough to produce the raising of a red-state eyebrow. You could actually witness the connection being forged between their expectations of who might be riding the bike, and the stiff reality of Team Tom. Nobody bought our actual cause of riding for the Royals whatsoever.
Osborne was particularly good to us, we shacked up at the Camelot Inn behind the Pizza Hut and made our way as usual to the municipal swimming pool, always deserted but for a couple teenage lifeguards, who we could never gauge as being happier or unhappier to have us swimming there. This pool actually cost two bucks a head, and, determined to get our moneys worth, we climbed up the diving boards to attempt the elusive backflip once again. A lifeguard volunteered a perfect example, executed with a quick tuck and minuscule splash, ready for Beijing. Ours would not be so pretty. However, after a triumphant day on the road, spirits rejuvenated by rain and progress, and nearly a week of riding east for Kansas City, we were ready for the consequences. After two or three ugly ones, we got the hang of it. Three hundred backflips later, we retired to the Pizza Hut and ate until we were sick.
The next morning, after too many pancakes, we ascended back up the three hills out of Osborne, and retraced four miles to the junction of Highway 24. On a straight and flatter highway, we began to loosen up and put our mileage down with ease. Hills were fewer and further between, instead the road gently curved left or right, for miles at a time, allowing for more reflection of the act of riding itself, the sounds of bugs that circled us, confused, smacking against our sunglasses till we batted them away. Cicada’s jumped from bushes, narrowly escaping death from our front tire, drifting along the shoulder of the road as we absorbed the golden prairies as they slowly changed to cornfields. As we rested, sought out shade under small trees, or yelled at cows that eyed us piteously.
After a relatively short ride, we began seeing signs for Cawker City, known best for its hosting one of the “8 Wonders of Kansas,” The World’s Largest Ball of Sisal Twine. We’d anticipated a stop there from the earliest stages of mapping our ride, what we hoped might be a quintessential landmark in our never-ending hunt for inimitable Americana. We blew by the twine at 20mph, screaming up a hill at a savage pace when I realized we’d overlooked it completely. Backtracking, we parked our bike to absorb the spectacle, which sat under a large gazebo, protecting it from the elements. We stayed at the ball for hours, reading up on its creation, poring over decades of entries scribbled in its guestbook. The ball weighs in at seven tons, and is added to each year in a festival involving the entire county. As we left, we took special note of its sign from the highway:
Thrift + Patience = Success. 
Another 19 miles from Cawker City was Beloit, where we would stop for the night. We were making better time, more consistently, aware of the rhythms of the bicycle, and had memorized the five available gears, when to use them, when to transition without expenditure of energy or valuable speed. We’d been riding over a week, near 300 miles total, and had been given an early estimate of nearly 5,000 virtual high fives, though a vast majority were solicited by Sam, reaping the benefits of a non-mandatory rear handlebar. In exchange, he was given a view of my back for twelve days, but the debate as to who was contributing most to our progress was generally fruitless.
About this point in the trip we became acutely aware that there were really only one or two things anyone would ever say to us regarding the bike. Kansans, as a people, are relatively like-minded, and never has it been more apparent as when they attempted to come up with jokes about our bike. By far the most common was the joke that the guy in back could, at any moment, stop peddling, and somehow screw me, the front rider, over for miles and miles. That is, until I look back and realize, to the soundtrack of a rusty trombone, that I’ve been peddling alone for god knows how long. This was an idea that people really loved, and we loved it along with them, until we’d heard it ninety hundred times. People were shocked to hear that we didn’t trade off on the front and back seat, there seemed to be an injustice in that, leading them to want to come up with an equalizing joke. It also might have been that we looked gayer than rainbows, and they needed something civil to say before rolling up the windows and really speaking their minds. But people weren’t mean to us whatsoever- they stopped in their cars, pulled dangerous u-turns on the highway, put their own vehicles in danger to offer us help. From a speeding car, we might have appeared as a single rider, until the very last moment, in passing. By this point, Sam would be grinning and waving, and it was tough for the Kansans to resist.
Beloit is the last stop for a long stretch of empty highway to Clay Center, a ride of over 60 miles with no rest stops to refill the bottles. We found ourselves without a choice of rival motels to choose from, and had to settle for an expensive “family suite,” the last available room in town. With the extra room we set up the ironing board for a photo shoot, and took some aerial action shots before screaming at the television for the last time, as the Celtics manhandled the Lakers, and Kevin Garnett proclaimed to the universe that “anything is possible.” The next morning, we got an early start on what was to be our second biggest ride of the trip. For the first time, we managed to ride 20 consecutive miles without stopping, in just over an hour’s time. The landscape had flattened completely, so that we rode for ten miles without the slightest turn, through fields of low-grown corn and lifeless threshing machines.
We rested 35 miles in, celebrating our newfound stamina and sleeping in the shade of small trees by the shoulder of the road. We sweated through a hot afternoon ride, coasting into Clay Center for a late lunch and taking in the sights. Slightly larger than we’d become accustomed to, Clay Center had at least three restaurants, a library, billiards hall, and theater offering more than one movie, more than once a week. We found our motel on the outskirts of town, and promptly fell asleep until dinner, when we wandered to the Hidden Dragon to absorb a lifetime’s serving of MSG and fortune cookies. Clay Center had the first hint of suburban existence, abandoned basketball courts grown over with crabgrass, and liquor shops open past nine. After wandering the side streets back to our modest motel, we crashed, knowing that when we awoke, we would say our farewells to small town Kansas for good.
The next day’s ride was out of Clay Center, another 40 miles east to Manhattan. Aware of our departure from truly rural Kansas, we stopped more frequently for photo shoots in cornfields and abandoned silos in towns of fewer than twenty people. The shoulder became narrower as we reached the halfway point, and we began to see another shift in landscape, as larger hills emerged with four lane highways, indicators of larger civilization, a college town on the horizon. By now our legs were well tested and rose to the occasion, working against the steep grade and holding to a hot pace, coasting down wide waves of concrete in excess of 30mph. We came to the outer suburbs of Manhattan, and made our way around the Kansas State University campus to the downtown center. Presented with our first real dining and entertainment options in weeks, we were wide-eyed and eager to explore. Not ten minutes later, the sky opened, and a massive thunderstorm dumped down.
We sought refuge in what looked like a college bar with dark mahogany walls and cheap chandeliers, hosting about ten locals on stools underneath a large screen broadcasting the Royals game. With the rain coming down in buckets we proceeded to hole up for some three strange hours, riding high on a $1.50 drink special and making fast friends with our tales of the highway. Emerging relatively plastered around five in the afternoon with the rain cut to a drizzle, we foolishly maneuvered the bike down the wet streets, across a large highway to the Motel 6. By some miracle surviving, we scored a cheap room and proceeded to pass out until dark. Waking for dinner back in town, we got a pasta dinner and retired back to the motel, resting up for a particularly long ride the next morning to the state capital, Topeka.
The next day’s ride would take us out of the countryside for good, highways opening up to eight lanes for the first time, and with it a much more aggressive flow of traffic, pinning us to our narrow invisible lane on the far shoulder. In these circumstances we always rode well, motivated by anxiety more than anything, but an inspiration to ride harder nonetheless. Thankfully, the road shrank back to two lanes for the majority of the ride, until we came to the outer suburbs of Topeka, and traffic became more questionably intense. We followed an offramp in hopes of discovering a parallel side street, only to find ourselves on the massive shoulder of screaming I-70, trucks blasting by at 80mph and kicking up waves of gravel. We got off the bike and ran it across to another ramp on the other side, where we mapped out a route along local streets to the financial district. We rode through lower-income neighborhoods, kids alternatively waving or chasing after us, over potholes and countless bumpy railroad tracks that jostled the frame for the first time since our Last Chance disaster.
Arriving stressed and tired after 64 long miles through every level of country and urban scenery, we found the downtown strip and some lunch. We had generally learned that the best source for directions was a local policeman, and as one directed us the four odd miles back out of town to the cheapest motels, I fought to stay awake. The stress of city riding multiplied any exhaustion tenfold, and we were eager to get off the bike for good after our most demanding day. The motel was inconveniently out of town, up a series of small, intense hills, and down a seedy older downtown strip, abandoned but for bail bonds and neon liquor stores. When we finally rolled to a stop at the Motel 6, we were done in. Leaving the bike a moment to locate our room, I took note of a scary-large hole in the back tire, evidently a casualty of a particularly bad hop over the tracks.
That night, intent on never putting our legs to use again, we ordered in and passed out around ten. Sometime after midnight, in the dark and obscure nether-hours, we sat upright simultaneously in panic. Somebody was pounding with both fists on our door, for a good ten consecutive seconds. We looked at each other, mystified and sleepily unsure of what was even taking place. We resolved to write it off as some passing maniac or preteen terrorist, exorcizing the frustrations of growing up in the slums of Topeka. We sat still in our beds in the dark for another minute before it happened again. This time they pounded away, hammering down on the door so that the whole strip of rooms must have awoken, thanking god it wasn’t their door suffering the weird wrath. Sam reached for the bike pump, the only remotely blunt object suitable to use as a weapon against whatever threat awaited us outside, and opened the door in his underwear.
A minute later, he came back inside and flipped on the lights. He’d found a cardboard sign outside our door, adorned with drawings and the word TOPEKA in big block letters. In his other hand was an assortment of trading cards, at least one of which of Ricky Martin, with our names written on them. In a foggy and half-terrified trance, we began to put the pieces together. We opened the motel door and looked down from the balcony to the parking lot, where, sitting in an empty space, grinning like a madman, sat Roddy Beall.
Over the course of the next two hours, laughing crazily with relief and surprise, Roddy proceeded to catch us up on his previous week, during which he’d decided to abandon a longer stay in Buenos Aires, Argentina, catch a flight to Denver, and begin hitchhiking from there all the way across the state of Kansas. Over the course of three days, camping out in cornfields with his backpack and tarp, he’d retraced our steps all the way to the Motel 6 on the outskirts of Topeka. He’d ridden with truckers, been passed over in the rain for hours trying to hitch east, and jogged the four miles from downtown to find our room, where he’d somehow convinced the motel attendant to divulge our information at one in the morning. We labored to fall asleep in the excitement, one day out from Kansas City, and with the surprise company of our best friend, who had traveled thousands of miles just to find us.
From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines,
Going where I list, my own master total and absolute,
I inhale great draughts of space,
The east and west are mine. We set out from Topeka fat on bad breakfast and sore from the previous day’s work, retracing our way to the highway, where we kept to the shoulder as cars blew in every direction out of town. We made it ten miles out before the hole in the back tire began to pronounce itself with a limp, a hiccup with every roll of the wheel that made a flapping sound as we gained speed downhill. Half infuriated with our luck, breaking down on the last day of riding, and half entertained by the turn of events in the last 24 hours, we decided against risking the bike’s permanent health, and began to walk it. We were out on country road again, cars appearing infrequently, none large enough to carry our bike. We flagged down a number of trucks in both directions, but none willing or able to take us.
After a half hour or so, a smaller truck loaded down with mulch and tree branches stopped for us, and a young couple from nearby Lawrence offered us a ride to the bike shop downtown. We strapped the bike down in the branches and sped off, trading stories with our rescuers and thanking our stars. Sunflower Cycles in Lawrence fixed our bike over lunch, and Roddy hitched into town to join us, before mapping our approach into the greater Kansas City area and setting off again, refueled and rolling smooth. We took a series of frontage roads, under shady overpasses and around fields of newly planted crops. The sun wore down with the afternoon, hot in the seas of pavement surrounding us, our destination looming somewhere out in front of us. While I’d hoped to be in the best physical shape of the trip rolling in to the city, fists pumped high in the air, I was tired as ever, wasted from the previous day’s mileage, and chugging up the final hills.
As we merged into larger roads in the western suburbs, we came to the largest hill we’d seen all trip, a huge downward slope with a steep upside, over which we knew from the odometer was our final destination. We tucked ourselves in for the coast down, and, screaming in the middle of speeding downtown traffic, we hit a maximum of 40mph, an all-time land speed record. Our momentum carried us a good ways up the hill, but we lost speed dramatically as it steepened. I had flirted with the thought of announcing that we had to make it up the hill, but abandoned it when I realized just how terrible it was going to be. Quietly hoping he might not care to finish the ride with such a grueling bang, Sam announced it to my chagrin: We have to make this hill.
Shifting into our highest gear, we slowed to a painful 9mph, then 7mph, so that we struggled to keep the bike on the road’s meager shoulder. We yelled and reached down into every painful hill we’d ascended over the course of over 500 miles of rolling country terrain, into every reservoir of every ounce of remaining strength. I was 70/30 sure I was going to barf— but we made it. Pulling over to a grassy patch at the top, we celebrated in pain, an entire state behind us, a hill that had looked insurmountable. The landscape shifted yet again to mowed lawns and gated communities, chain restaurants and large SUV’s. We rode into the suburbs of Lenexa exhausted, but in the highest spirits.
In Lenexa we met with Sam’s cousin, also named Sam, who happened to be a season ticket holder with the Royals. This seemingly extra-terrestrial knowledge unfolded for us in the span of three or so days leading up to our arrival, so we had become more than eager to make contact. Arriving at Sam’s luxurious suburban digs, we retold our story for the extended family and were offered a free place to stay, bearded Argentinean hitchhiking friend and all. For the next few days, we relaxed, slept in, took in the sights of Kansas City and enjoyed the greatest Royals game I’ve ever witnessed, the second largest come-from-behind win in franchise history, over the San Francisco Giants. The next day, June 23rd, was the day we’d all been waiting for.
After two days of marvelous, marvelous leisure and rest, we donned our uniforms for the final time, and set out from Lenexa for the last 20 miles to Kauffman Stadium, just east of downtown Kansas City. We rode along a crowded highway, anxious city riding through yellow stoplights and a myriad of local barbeques. We took Troost Ave. through older, soulful neighborhoods of faded red bricks and roaring buses, bewildered children’s faces mashed against the windows staring out at us. We peddled through progressively lower income neighborhoods, people out on porches looking increasingly more surprised to see us, but waving nonetheless, on the final home stretch. We came to the top of a large hill, and looked out to a sea of parking lots. There, not two miles in front of us, sat the stadium, lit up like a lighthouse, a beacon, an oasis of dirt and grass. We had made it. The final mile was a blur, through the entrance to the surprise of the parking lot attendants, and down the final hill up to the gates. We stopped there, silent, and took it in. The odometer read 571.5 miles.
We were ushered through a side gate, walking the bike down to the ground level, where we were led into a room full of powder-blue clad cheerleaders eating garlic fries and nachos. Here we stored the bike, and sat down with the Blue Crew, a team of twenty-somethings whose job it is to launch hotdogs through blue bazookas to fans in the upper decks, facilitate mid-inning entertainment, and get people jazzed about the baseball game they’re trying to watch. The Blue Crew were gently excited by our arrival, and offered us dinner, while we waited for Kasey, the Royals entertainment coordinator, to show.
Kasey, an attractive fellow twenty-something year old woman with extensive headsets and walkie-talkie belt attachments introduced herself with four blue backpacks loaded full of free Royals gear, which she repeatedly warned us not to open in public, as jealous fans might tear us to shreds upon seeing their contents. Buzzing with mysterious excitement, we left them with the bicycle and our sweaty helmets, and followed Kasey up through a series of marble hallways to find our tickets for the rest of the family. After securing those, Kasey was given the affirmative through one of her many headsets to lead us through a security-protected lobby and up an elevator to a hallway of closed doors, all labeled with small, golden stars bearing names. We were led down to the Frank White Suite, where Kasey revealed, to our surprise, that we would be introduced to the general manager.
Putting on our calmest game-faces, we were led through the door to the box, a smallish room with ten or so different screens, and roof-to-floor windows overlooking the field. Four men in black suits turned to face us, and Dayton Moore, standing at all of about 5’6’’ and wearing a golden embroidered Kansas City Royals tie, offered us a handshake. We chatted with Moore and his advisors, whose names escaped me the moment they were introduced, as I attempted to accept my surroundings as a result of having ridden to them from Denver over the course of two weeks. The guys were entertained enough, but had their business to attend to, and we graciously left back down the elevator, sneaking looks at each other like we’d licked the president’s silverware. Kasey led us to our seats in the second row behind first base, where we sat fifteen feet from our favorite players warming up, and called out to them, waving like kids in the back of the short bus.
The rest of our crew arrived, and the game began, as the Royals took an early lead and we soaked in the view from the phenomenal seats. The images we’d taken in over the last few hours were wallpapered over my eyelids, and the warm summer night washed in like the tide. In the fifth inning, Joel Goldberg, an announcer for Fox Sports Net, came down to the row and tapped on my shoulder. The broadcasters had gotten word of our arrival from the almighty Kasey, and had decided to do a live-televised interview during the game. We slid down the row and briefly rehearsed what Joel might ask us, as he pointed to a camera in the distant outfield, and waited for a lull in the game to get the go-ahead. When the time came, we went through a two-minute recap of the adventure, the reasons why we’d done it, the hardships we’d encountered on the way. The on-air broadcast team of Paul Splitorff and Ryan Lefevre were amused, and before we knew it, it was finished. While the details of our answers are hazier to me now than my classmates in first grade, I know it went well.
The grand finale was still before us, however, as we awaited the eighth inning stretch, when Kasey had informed us we’d be interviewed live on the new 106-foot high-definition jumbotron, the largest screen in North America, in front of some 30,000 fans in attendance. Tim Scott, the designated “game host” who oversees mid-inning entertainment such as dugout dance-offs and trivia giveaways came down with a camera crew to find us in the seventh, and began going over the 90 second spot we’d be up onscreen. Tim was exponentially more nervous than Joel, a smarmy made-for-TV host who insisted we practice his prescripted jokes over and over again, cracking his neck from side to side every twenty seconds. Before he could turn me into an anxious monkey, the inning ended, and the camera light clicked on.
I remember intentionally avoiding the screen with my eyes, in the case that my mouth would fall open and I’d die a frozen death, but I heard my voice resonating through every row of seats at Kauffman Stadium, answering why we’d ridden 600 miles to see the boys in blue, and why through such eccentric means. Tom executed his jokes mock-spontaneously, and I became aware of the thousands of eyes pinned on us from every direction, a sea of blue shirts staring down at us, our section buzzing with people confused and excited, leaning around us to dip their kid’s faces on screen, offering high-fives and calling their families at home. The interview was over in a heartbeat, and we said our farewells to Kasey and Tim, to settle in for the ninth inning, as the Royals closed the door on the lowly Colorado Rockies.
In that inning I sat stunned, flanked by a friend that had traveled 600 miles across the American heartland on a vintage tandem bicycle with me, and another that had traversed whole continents to be there at our side. It dawned on me, in an almost cinematic epiphany, that I had caused this great, wild thing to happen, through a series of outlandish letters mailed out from my desk in San Francisco, letters I never imagined might be returned to me. I sat in my chair under the thin veil of stars beyond the stadium lights, and watched the stands erupt as the Royals notched the victory. The grass has never, ever been greener than it was that night.
Our mild celebrity was good enough to get us recognized as we rode up the spiral walkway and out, shouting in victory through the gates amongst a sea of blue shirted fans. Sam’s great uncle, at the age of 90 and sporting a blue KC trucker hat, proclaimed that he would never, ever forget it. We had been given more than we could have asked for, when it had been enough in itself just to see the stadium lights from the crest of the final hill. In a hail of handshakes and last congratulations, we hugged, and left the stadium behind us, bike strapped to the racks of Sam’s jeep.
Allons! the road is before us!
It is safe, I have tried it, my own feet have tried it well—
be not detain’d! Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten,
Let the tools remain in the workshop! let the money remain unearn’d!
Let the school stand! Let the preacher preach in his pulpit!
Let the lawyer plead in the court, and the judge expound the law.
Camerado, I give you my hand!
I give you my love more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law,
will you give me yourself, will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live? AfterthoughtsWhile I’ve unconsciously omitted a thousand small, wonderful details from this 20-page screed about our ride across America, I think I should mention a few final things that should have found a place somewhere:
Over the course of the entire bike ride, Sam never washed his jersey once. We each brought two, and while I traded off between whichever of mine seemed the “lesser of two evils” he stuck boldly to his one. He got a great amount of pleasure out of bragging about how nice it was going to be to don his brand new, never-worn jersey for the final ride to the stadium. I doubt I ever admitted it to him, but I know I was jealous by the end.
The amount of food we consumed over this 12-day period may be a Guinness record that goes forever undocumented. With a workout regiment of biking roughly 50 miles a day, two human beings can consume the equivalent of a fully-grown panda bear in roughly three hours. While I was tempted to exercise our pal Weston’s dietary suggestion of three double cheeseburgers from McDonald’s, I never had the nerve. We always ate local when we had the chance, and probably did more to actually execute the purpose of the governmental-issued stimulus package to the economies of rural Kansas than anyone else in the world. The universe, even.
This trip became possible with the commitment of two foolish individuals, but it became a reality with the help of our sponsor, Team Tom. With the cost of our supplies and customized T-Rex jerseys, coupled with the unforeseen breakdowns and subsequent motel bills, we truly could not have accomplished this feat without the commitment of Tom Kenning and Doug Price, whose Team Tom moniker was proudly displayed not only on the largest screen in North America, but on live television, for all to see and wonder about.
While I may have joked at least once about the “red state” of Kansas, for all its Cardinal Cafés and apathetic teenage lifeguards, it is an American treasure, a time capsule, a scenic and charming way of life for a great many people. Riding across its plains and encountering its inhabitants instilled a faith in me for the American people, who looked after us as their own, slowing down to offer help, tipping their hats as we took up their highways with our idiotic bike. While we may have earned our share of strange looks, not one person insulted us, serving us with a kindness one might only discover in that part of our vast nation. As two modern-day explorers of the 21st century, we embarked on an unforeseeable adventure, and have returned with a legitimate American tale for the ages. Kansas, in your endless amber waves of grain, this captain tips his hat to you.
Go Royals,
Will Weston,
San Francisco, California.
