Day 55: Hello Kansas, Hello Pizza Hut

Distance: 96 Miles

Song of the Day:Swervedriver — The Other Jesus

9AM: Woke from air conditioned sleep and step out into 90 degree morning, air binds you in a sluggish inescapable haze as if residue from some morose wizard’s distant incantations. Roll a few hundred feet to the food stop Stacy’s parents own, drink a water and eat a biscuit, trying to keep it frugal, but it's a wasted effort because Stacy has called ahead and nobody will let us pay a nickel.

Steal fleeting glances of Okeene as we escape north: a grain elevator, two families of well-bred cattle, with occasional goat or donkey posturing as herd member; a woman salutes in sight from under visor, running to the pharmacy or church — little else is open.

Ten miles from town a fierce wind beats in from the west, not an appropriate angle to halt us in our tracks but it cuts against our panniers and drags on our momentum.

We try to segue West onto a thin highway stretching toward Oklahoma’s panhandle, but dangerous gusts blow from the northwest, billow us tête-à-tête with wheat trucks passing at 70MPH towards the season’s harvest paycheck, say No Thank You, bike a half circle and return to the prior route to the north, safer and well-shouldered. Keep on pedaling without knowing where we’re heading next.

Lizzie dings her bell for a gas station break; fill up our water vessels from back room filtered tap and chat with the attendant who advertises the next station in her chain twenty miles north in Chorokee, a trucker haven with a Sonic and Subway and even a shower room.

Stop in Cherokee for sandwiches and a 40 oz. chocolate shake from Sonic, as well as several helpings of Gatorade from the soda fountain. Stray hillbillies watch Cops on the TV until something even more atrocious is turned on; we don’t talk much and soon drag back out into the heat, spurned on by the promise of crossing into Kansas on the next leg.

Thirty more unremarkable miles, I listen to a Swervedriver album for the hundredth time, ‘earning’ a large gulp of water with each song change. Hit another gas station and duck inside for a big afternoon cool-down. Two young women operate the store among unsavory clientele, feigning politeness to customers offering thinly veiled mysogeny or braggard behavior; one flits outside for a cigarette break, in near hysterics about our trip and especially Lizzie, asks her, “You’re pretty aren’t you afraid?” Lizzie gives some answer about how sweaty and hairy she’s gotten.

Sun is heavy set as we approach Medicine Lodge, it’s after 8PM and the only restaurant open in town is a Pizza Hut so we go. The salad bar is so incredible we regret ordering a pizza (though we ate that too), in addition to the normal salad fixings it sports cottage cheese, pear halves, applesauce, sea captain’s crackers, nilla wafers and vanilla pudding.

We spend the night in a small strip of grass beyond a baseball field where a softball game is wrapping up, well after 9PM at this point, small town summer and no one is in a fuss about leaving too soon, to our detriment as we’re unable to set up our tent in good conscience with so many trucks crowding the lawn. We take showers in the public bathroom, mine cold, and wait for night time quiet before passing out, stirring only when a contractor sprays mosquito fog over the infield in early twilight.