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DAY 6 – Friday, March 19 (Anniversary of the Iraq War)
START: Troy, IL
END: Manhattan, KS
MILEAGE: 389 miles

HIGHLIGHTS: The Arch; out of place in a college town

So often, landmarks fall dreadfully short of our expectations.  Anybody who’s ever been to the Statue of Liberty knows what I mean.  Whenever you see her on TV, Lady Liberty is portrayed as huge, standing tall over New York harbor, greeting all who come to this land from miles away.  In reality, and by comparison, she is disappointingly, almost embarrassingly small, tucked into a little corner near New Jersey where you really have to go out of your way to see her.  The Empire State Building is never as tall as you imagine.  The Hollywood sign can only be appreciated without binoculars from very specific areas of the city.  Even Mount Rushmore, I was told looks much tinier than one would expect.

I always imagined the St. Louis Arch would fall into this same category.  The only pictures I could ever remember seeing with the Arch were collages in which the Arch’s image was pasted over the St. Louis skyline, standing tall and prominent.  In reality, I always assumed that it was probably just this little fifty-foot cement sculpture buried in some square in the middle of the city.  Instead, it would prove to be the first of many pleasant surprises on this trip, where reality vastly exceeded expectations.

Approaching St. Louis from the Illinois side of the Mississippi River the night before, I was able to see the skyline lit up in the distance.  As I looked, I noticed a thin sliver of light out in front.  I said to Lauren, “Hey, there’s the Arch.”  Even from a good twenty miles away, it was obvious that the Arch was huge.  The fact that we could see it from that far away at night spoke volumes.  As we got closer, it became apparent that the Arch (lit up purple at night) was bigger than any of the buildings making up the St. Louis skyline.  What I’d always assumed to be a tiny concrete structure hidden from view was in fact a 600-foot stainless steel beauty right out in front of the city on the banks of the Mississippi River.

The next morning, Lauren and I took picture after picture from every conceivable angle.  The Arch’s angular shape and reflective properties made for some interesting plays with light and dark.  It would be hard for even the world’s worst photographer to take a bad picture. 

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It’s sheer size made it impossible to capture the whole thing in one picture, though Lauren and I sure tried.  I even walked right to the river’s edge, laid down on my back and zoomed the camera all the way out… and I still couldn’t get the entire gaping mouth into one picture.  Then I lowered the camera looking just with my eyes and realized that even with my own natural field of vision it was impossible to see the whole Arch at once.  One of the sides was always just beyond my peripheral vision, and I had to make a decision between looking at the top or bottom because it was impossible to see both at once.  

St. Louis is known as “the Gateway to the West” and the Arch’s official name is “The Gateway Arch.”  This is where Lewis and Clark began their legendary journey in search of the fabled Northwest Passage, thus putting America’s settlement of the west into full swing.  The Arch is part of the Jefferson Expansion National Memorial.  Underground, beneath the Arch lies the Museum of Westward Expansion, a football-field-sized tribute to America’s conquering of the western frontier.

We had left the hotel around ten o’clock that morning.  After nothing but oatmeal for five straight days, we were ready for a real breakfast, and being in the Midwest I knew you couldn’t swing a dead polecat without hitting a Waffle House.  We figured somewhere in the 30 miles between the hotel and the city, there would have to be a Waffle House or an IHOP or some kind of breakfast place off the interstate.  Well… there wasn’t.  So with stomachs growling, Lauren and I just kind looked at each other and shrugged saying, “Oh well, guess we’ll eat after.” 

Man I wish we had eaten before.  The museum was absolutely fascinating, but our stomachs and blood sugars were yelling at us to cut it short.  There’s a tram that you can ride to the top of the Arch which Lauren had wanted to take, but the line to get tickets was as insanely long as the line for the tram itself.  Instead, we opted to spend about an hour reading a timeline history of the American settlement.  One thing that I found interesting was the way the museum phrased their little historical snippets.  Somebody who had turned their brain off for a minute wouldn’t realize just how badly we screwed over the Indians as we claimed more and more land for ourselves.  For instance, one blurb would say that in such and such a year, “Seminole Indians ceded Florida to America.”  We all know that the rest of that sentence should probably read, “…under the threat of extermination.”  Elsewhere it would say, “Cherokee Indians are given a patch of land west of the Mississippi.”  The museum left out the part that explains how that patch of land was probably a swath of barren desert.  One thing I would have liked the museum to include was an exhibit explaining the dark side of the Westward Expansion.  I know it was good and important for this country, but at least acknowledge and pay respect to the people who caught the raw end of it all.

Then again, for all I know, maybe they did have an exhibit like that, but Lauren and I were both ready to pass out from hunger and had to go find food.  But first, I just couldn’t leave St. Louis without getting a shotglass with the Arch on it.  The museum gift shop didn’t have any, so we walked to a nearby hotel and found what we were looking for in their shop.  On the way out, one of the hotel employees noticed Lauren looking a little anemic and gave her an entire pack of Lifesavers®.  We hopped back on the interstate and got off about ten miles later, pulling into the first Waffle House we came across.  After five-days-worth of oatmeal, I must say bacon, eggs and waffles are just so incredibly delicious.  We caught up on our postcard and journal writing and got our arteries sufficiently clogged before getting back on the road re-energized.

The rest of Missouri was a blur, mostly because it whipped past us at 80m.p.h.  We decided to just take Interstate 70 all the way across and get into Kansas.  “Redneck Woman” came on the radio again and I cranked it up saying, “Hey, this is the song we heard in Nashville.” 

The sun was setting as we crossed into Kansas.  We got off the interstate in Lawrence and continued on two-lane U.S. 24 going west.  We stopped for dinner at a little hole-in-the-wall place called Deanna’s Café in Grantville.  The place was old, hot and charming.  The booth we sat in was upholstered in green polyvinyl, looking as though it came straight out of the 1970’s.  In the bathroom, instead of paper towels or an air dryer, there was an old fashioned cloth towel dispenser, the kind with a ten-foot towel “loop” on a spindle that is cranked down and reused by each new customer – and is generally considered to be about the most unsanitary thing you could ever wipe your hands on.  Next to it was a sign urging: “Wash Hands – It Fights Infection.”  Out in the restaurant’s vestibule was a staple of all small-town gathering places, a corkboard for locals to advertise their goods and services – a poor man’s classified section.  Tacked to the board was a handwritten note requesting a “Tom Turkey – Breeding Age.”  Only in Kansas.

GRAFFTI LOG:

In the bathroom of Deanna’s Cafe was a souvenir license plate for the Kansas City Chiefs.  Some clever patron had crossed out “Chiefs” with a key and scratched in the word “Quiefs” underneath.

We continued west as night fell over Kansas.  Off to the south we could see the modest skyline of Topeka.  We started to look for a motel for the night but none of the small towns we passed through seemed to have many houses, let alone enough people in town to even run a motel.  Our best bet we figured was in the town of Manhattan, another sixty miles up the road.  It was the only town other than Topeka in this part of the state that was printed in bold on the map.

We were cruising along listening to a local Topeka country station.  The lady DJ, Leah encouraged us to call in and make a request.  So I did.  I wanted to hear that Redneck Woman song again.  Moreover, I wanted to know who sang it, because I was pretty sure once we were back in Philadelphia, we’d never hear it again and I wanted to be able to download…er, buy the CD.  The line rang and I told the girl on the other end my request.  She told me to hang on and she would put me on with Leah.  Hm, that was odd I thought.  A call screener at a radio station in Topeka?  Even in cities like Philadelphia the DJ’s field their own phone calls.  When Leah came on the phone we had a great five-minute conversation.  She told me the name of the artist, Gretchen Wilson, and we both enjoyed a nice long lament about the way country music has gone, how you rarely hear songs quite that country on country radio anymore.  She told me to listen in around ten o’clock and our conversation would be on the air. 

I wouldn’t realize it until about two weeks later driving across Montana, when I heard this very same DJ on the radio again, that my voice had actually gone out, not just to the people of Topeka, but to radio stations across the country on a nationally syndicated radio show.  Lia Knight was doing her Friday Night Fights with Gretchen Wilson as the contender, and I had gotten to voice my support for Gretchen to the nation. 

We found a Motel 6 in Manhattan (which apparently calls itself “The Little Apple”) and as I’d been doing at every hotel so far on the trip, I told a little white lie to the desk clerk, saying I would be the only person occupying the room.  Economy hotels, we were realizing, charge an extra fee for each additional person, yet they still give you the same room they would have given a lone traveler.  One of the hotels we’d stopped at earlier in the week gave me a room with two beds, even though I’d told the guy it was just for me.  The way we saw it, if they were going to give us the same amenities regardless, it just didn’t make sense to pay the extra 6-10 dollars they were charging.  Honestly, there was no way Lauren was going through ten dollars worth of water and towels a night.

The charade was the same at every hotel.  I’d park the car in a spot where it couldn’t be seen from the motel office, then walk in and make one attempt to play it honest.  “Could I have a non-smoking room with one bed for the night please.” 

But the desk clerk always ruined it, “How many people?” 

I’d be forced to lie and say, “Just me.” 

I’d fill out all the forms, hand him my AAA and credit cards, take my key and head over to the room.  Most of the time we were fortunate and the room was on the other side of the building, out of sight from the office.  But every now and then, they’d give us a room within eyeshot and Lauren and I would have to be sneaky.  I’d open up the room, leaving the door propped, then go back to the car and have Lauren just walk over while I pulled the car around.  She’d stroll past the office as though she was just another customer, then casually slip through the open door of our room.  I of course would then have to bring all our stuff in myself lest the clerk spot my unpaid “guest”, but that was about par no matter where they stuck us. 

In retrospect, we probably needn’t have utilized so much cloak and dagger.  With the rare exception of those nights when there was an actual manager working the desk – or some snively little weasel who thought his job made him some kind of an authority figure – most of the desk clerks were simply tired-looking middle-aged women or teenagers who were making maybe fifty cents over minimum wage.  They viewed any time spent dealing with customers as time that was taking them away from the book or television show they were absorbed in.  They couldn’t have given two shits if we were hosting a twenty-man orgy in that single room.

It was Friday night and we decided to go find some small-town nightlife.  One thing we knew we wanted to do on this trip was spend time mingling with the locals wherever we stopped.  We imagined ourselves at little dive honky-tonks, dancing to bad music from the house band, strangers teaching us how to two-step, rednecks asking if they could cut in, old women rubbing Lauren’s belly and hillbillies buying me shots of Wild Turkey.  We envisioned ourselves as being the novelty act in town – the young, good-looking couple from New Jersey.  We had such high hopes.

Unbeknownst to us at the time, Manhattan is home to Kansas State University.  We went down to a street lined with bars that the Motel 6 clerk had told me about, only to realize that every single one of them was a college bar.  Lauren and I felt dreadfully out of place.  For starters, the area was pretty dead that night so we couldn’t even hide out in the crowd.  We suspected the school may have been on spring break for as sparsely populated as the bars were.  We walked up and down the street looking for a place that had karaoke or a live band, or something besides just a bar and some tables.  Finding none of that, we settled on a bar with a dance floor that claimed to have a DJ coming in later that night.  I got a beer for myself and a Sprite for Lauren. 

We ordered up a plate of hot wings and took a seat at an outdoor table.  The night was warm with a gentle breeze in the air.  At the other tables, cliques of five to ten college students sat laughing and drinking and having a good time.  It was probably just self-consciousness, but we could have sworn here and there that they were laughing at us.  We were definitely not the young, good-looking couple in this neighborhood.  On her many trips to the bathroom, Lauren says she got some strange looks from the girls inside the bar.  There they were in their tight low-rider jeans, open-toed shoes and midriff shirts showing off flat tanned stomachs and belly-button rings, and there goes Lauren waddling by in white skippy sneakers with a big old belly concealed under denim maternity overalls.  I’m sure the same thought was running through all their heads (the same thought that would run through my head in a reversed scenario), “What is a pregnant woman doing at a bar?” 

Lauren and I looked at each other and laughed a few times before deciding to return to the motel.  We walked hand in hand back to the car.  I kissed Lauren on the lips and said, “I love you so much and I love that you’re carrying our baby.”  I caressed her belly with both hands adding, “It’s okay that we’re lame, because at least we’re lame together.” 

Somewhere underneath the thick layer of denim, our baby gave an approving kick.

ONTO DAY 7