Bike Across Kansas: Part I
Well the BAK. It was quite the adventure.
I had planned my flights with a not much fudge factor, so when I got to Birmingham and I had trouble with the American Gate Agent checking my bike box and then my flight being delayed I started getting a touch antsy. Then I got a call from Mom asking me if I had heard anything about the storms. Apparently there was the “storm of the century” brewing in Kansas ready to spit millions of tornadoes directly into the path of incoming jetliners.
Well I managed to work out the car details where Dave and Brandy graciously picked up my car at the airport despite a sketchy key copy. That way I didn’t have to pay eleventy million dollars in car parking fees.
We landed late in Chicago and my 50-minute layover became a ten-minute one. Luckily I had on running shoes and had been practicing my speed-work so I did some Chicago Midway Intervals and made it in time to board. Alas the flight was delayed . . . for hours. (By the way do you ever feel like a jerk when you run through the airport and get to a flight then have to wait for five minutes to board- then all of those people you passed while running calmly walk up to the gate and board- I feel like one of those stupid stop light racers. I wonder if the walkers get that same smug sense of satisfaction)
After all of the drama I landed in KCI after midnight. We got home and I stayed up late chatting with the brothers then I had to reassemble the bike- a procedure on which I had only a tenuous grasp. I ended up staying up all night- taping my bars fiddling with my chain, cables, brifters, cogs and sprockets and pre-flighting every little detail.
I trudged into the kitchen bright and early and had an awesome breakfast of Blackberry pancakes. (My mom has been on a pancake kick- after some foodie columnist said it was the in thing (i love you mom- not complaining, just saying))
I then loaded my bike sans pedals onto a semi trailer got on the bus and met my uncle- and we drove what seemed like 12 hours to the magnificent western Kansas town of St. Francis- a mere seven miles from the Colorado Border to begin bicycling across the great state of Kansas.
I’ll pick up with more in a bit
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