Kansas

I have John Black on the brain. Partly due to the holidays, but mainly because I saw him the other night. We went out driving, checking out holiday lights and talking. I haven't seen him (other than a totally random what-the-hey moment in Meijers one time) in well over a year. We do talk on the phone or on the great, big, social network giant of Facebook from time to time - so we pretty much keep up on each other's lives, but we haven't been face to face hanging out in a long, long time.

It was great, but a little weird. Like I just got time warped or something. It was late, dark, and as I climbed into his car (the same one he had when we were together) it was seriously like a mini time machine. It was the exact same scene that we had played out hundreds of times before - just with a big chunk of time missing in the middle. I can't even count the numbers of mini-adventures or drives we took in that car - we were a great road trip couple. With the exception of Kansas.

Kansas is by far the funniest car story I have with John Black. It is also the funniest travel story that I have with anyone. John Black has a brother that lives in Denver. About a year or so after we started dating, we decided to road trip out there so that I could meet them and he could see his niece and nephew. It was a great idea! But it was a loooooonng drive - one that we were determined to make in a straight shot, no stopping at a hotel along the way. Now, I am a fantastic road tripper. I am always the girl that scoops out the fun facts, has the driving guides, knows the best spot to stop for food, and I am an unparalleled navigator, even if cannot instantly tell you which is north at any given moment. (Hello people! That is what signs and maps are for!) However, I am not the best driver. I will say that I have gotten much, much better - but at this time in my life I still hated to drive at night or in crappy weather. I also hated to drive if I couldn't sing to the radio at the same time, which didn't please John Black when he was trying to sleep. So naturally we left at six o'clock at night in the rain.

There are two main routes you can use to get there; one northern that goes through Chicago and heads out towards Nebraska or another southern one that goes down to Indianapolis and heads west from there through Missouri. We decided to stick to the northern route because technically it was supposed to be a tad bit shorter. Here is what I remember from the drive there. Sitting in stand still traffic in Chicago among about fifty six gazillion truckers all trying to get through the city into the heartland and trying to decide over and over again if we were in the truck lane or the car lane. Listening to the Counting Crow's Hard Candy CD so many times that I probably was singing it in my sleep. The utter and complete darkness of middle America at night, where there are literally no major (or semi-major even) cities along our path from Chicago to Denver. Also, and this is important, there was a giant, green dinosaur that John Black wanted to climb on and get his picture taken. I begged to keep going because we were about twenty hours into our trip at this point and all I wanted to do was sleep. So we moved on, made it to our destination, and all without any serious issues. One week later - we climb back in the car to head home.

We decided that I would drive first, having learned our lesson on the way there after we both stayed awake in the beginning and I proved to be a bad second wind driver. So together we found our way to the highway junction in Denver, discovered our particular highway number, and John Black curled up in his bucket seat to sleep. I happily drove along, singing, of course. to Counting Crows as quietly as I could - thoughtfully skipping all the high notes so that John Black wouldn't wake up. (Which is a bigger sacrifice for a soprano than I think he appreciated.) I was faithfully following my highway number which was supposed to stay the same for at least the length of a state or two. All was calm until about just before dawn. The sun was just starting to peek up through the corn fields when John Black woke up, yawned and asked how my night shift went. I gave him the good news first - we were making truly excellent time. Then I gave him the bad news - we're in Kansas, Dorothy.

I will give you a quick moment to consult your mental atlas - or go find a physical one if you haven't had geography in many years. Kansas is not on our northern route. Not even one teeny, tinsy tip of Kansas touched our northern route. John Black was understandably confused and pissy. Not the way to start off a day where you are trapped in a car with each other. When we had left Denver, I had on-ramped my happy little self onto the right highway BUT I took the southern ramp, not the northern one. If you have driven around Denver, you understand this is a completely believable accident. There are highways everywhere! But on this morning, John Black was not in an understanding mood. We stopped at several different backwoods gas stations - you know, the kind with two working pumps and a 'convenience' store full of hunting supplies and camo souvenirs? Have I mentioned John Black is the antithesis of Hunting Man? So the grizzly gas station attendants basically laughed at us, shook their heads at John Black's awful luck to be stuck with a woman that did this to him, and told us we might as well keep on trucking on the southern route because we were already parallel to our old route and it would just add a few hours to our trip if we tried to cut across and rejoin the northern highway.

Now I looked at it like we got the unexpected bonus of seeing the sites in about five new states - to this day I love unplanned exploring jaunts. John Black looked at it like he wanted to wring my neck. It ended up taking us almost six hours longer to get home; mainly because we were so exhausted we ended up stopping many more times that on the way out there - we even got all the way to Flint and literally neither one of us could finish the drive so we slept in a truck stop in Flint. Yup. Flint. Truck stop. And we lived to tell the story. It also took us a while because we were completely stymied by the belt loop of Indianapolis. By the time we figured out that the highway circled the city, our sleep deprived brains already let us go around it twice. (In my defense as a navigator, we had no plans to be in Indianapolis, so I had no fun facts or maps.) We also stopped in Missouri at literally the best Pizza Hut in the United States. I think it was so good that we said if we drove again we would go south simply to have that Pizza Hut again, it was that good. Okay, maybe that is a lie, but it seriously was the best cheesy bread we have ever had to this day.

So what lessons did I learn from this adventure? One. Get cheesy bread in Missouri. Two. Bring more CD's. Three. Always get extra navigational tools for the times when you take a wrong turn and end up in Kansas. And Four. If you don't let John Black stop for the crazy, green dinosaur picture on the way to Denver, promise him you'll get it on the way home, and then subsequently miss that state on the way home.....you will hear about it for the rest of your life.