Hey Bandit! This is Little Beaver... Put your foot to the floor, we got your backdoor and I'm clear!

KP AND STEF ACROSS AMERICA! ACTION! ADVENTURE! AX MURDERERS, BEARDS AND MANY-APPENDAGED FARM ANIMALS
T SHIRT SIZE: AWESOME GOES NATION WIDE!*

Brief synopsis (you can skip if you like):

Our original plan was Munich, Germany for this week, to be present and show some freakin’ respect to our Bavarian brothers during Oktoberfest, but, as you can tell from my use of the word ‘original’, it didn’t happen like that. So we set our sights on Austin, TX for my rock n’ roll boyfriend Jack White and the Austin City Limits festival, and then Texas went all underwater and stuff and was in the newspaper (some people lost all their sporting equipment! How awful! Can you even imagine? All your hai lai and boxing equipment, lawn darts and poker chips, gone! I know, right?), now we’re on the fence. LP is KP’s kid sister and she got a job in the famous hub for the wild wild west, Dodge City Kansas so she enlists KP and me to help her move. To Kansas…to Kansas…ROAD TRIP!

*and if you’re wondering if we bought a keytar,
yes, yes we did.

Day 1 and 2: St. Louis, MO



So there we are at 3:30 am, pulling into the Comfort Inn (or wherever) after a very long, marathon hike from Kalamazoo to St. Louis that we didn’t even get started on until 8pm Michigan time. The GPS malfunctioned a little, and there were three of us in two cars. A scary wrong turn, KP seeing ghosts of blonde haired women, some police calling, then some more wrong turns. Much shit talking and searching the airwaves for name stations (ie: Max, Bob, Dan, Jack, etc.) was done on the phone to keep us focused. We made it. Thank you, Red Bull, corns, and Camel Lights.

Here’s what you need to know about St. Louis, MO. There is a GIANT beer factory there. I mean giant like it has it’s own gravitational pull, giant. You can take a tour where they brag about how delicious their not-so-delicious beer is, and then when it’s done you can sample the beer to see how not-so-delicious it is for real.



P.S: those horses have enormous balls, this portion of the tour is not for the faint of heart. Seriously? Those balls are huge and I bet they do that on purpose to emasculate all the sissy Coors drinkers. Big babies.


We saw the arch at night, Stef argued over whether that river was the Missouri River, the Mississippi River or the Nile, we had some not-so-delicious-but-well-deserved beer at a sweet oyster bar where there was a guy that looked like Dwight Yokam (Actually he looked more like the naked cowboy in NYC but Stef had no idea what I was talking about when I said that) and played the steel guitar and we were the only people in the joint. That is all you need to know about St. Louis, MO. We saw a magical used bookstore too, which was nice. Not a lot to pump your fist about in St. Louis, MO.

Day 3: Kansas Bound

Nine freaking hours in the car, which was pretty alright until we passed Wichita. Then I wanted to kill myself. Here’s my impression of Kansas after you get off of I-80 en route to the famous Dodge City. Ready? It’s like this:













there is absolutely nothing in Kansas and no reason to go there ever for any reason unless you either are really into masochism and hate yourself, or if you’re brave (and bored, Kansas means a level of boredom that I’ve never even experienced before, I was hoping for a tornado just for something to do to see if KP’s evacuation plan works) enough to visit Lisa and bring her a chocolate strawberry and some corns. She’d really like that. If you’ve just been drafted to the Kansas City Chiefs, consider being traded immediately to somewhere better geographically, like the New Orleans Saints or the Denver Broncos. More on Denver later. If it is your “career” you need to worry about, consider the New Orleans Saints, or the Denver Broncos. Do not consider the Detroit Lions, even if the only other option for you is the Chiefs. If this is in fact the case, consider a career change. I hear ex-football guys do quite well in used car sales or personal securities.

So we made it to Dodge City. Finally. The setting sun provided a breathtaking background to the meat-packing plants and kill yards that modern-day Dodge is known for. All this talk about meat-packing is getting me a little riled up and we’re in the famous gateway to the west, home of Gunsmoke, Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Big Nose Katie the soiled dove (apparently, according to her plaque),



so let’s see some freaking cowboys! Right? We were boot-pulling, calf-wrassling, move-along-doggie, dude-ranch, licking BBQ sauce off of our fingers ready to hog-tie this town for what it was worth. I wanted to meet Sam Elliot. KP wanted Peter Fonda. I wanted to see Front Street and lose a poker game to a stranger with a curly moustache and whiskey breath, aces up his sleeves and the business end of a Smith & Wesson Peacemaker. Here’s my impression of Front Street:






Talk about a bowel-dropping letdown. A shattering, really. It wasn’t that there was nothing going on (even though there was nothing going on, despite it being Friday night and a small town smack-ass three-hours to anywhere middle of nowhere, shit, if it was my job to be at a slaughter house with a chainsaw, knee-deep in cow stomachs for 18 hours a day in a place like Dodge, all I’d want to do is self-medicate), there was just nothing there. Nothing. No cool old-timey (and pivotal to the growth and formation of this country, mind you) general stores and saloons, no wild sharp-shooter sheriffs fingering their pistols, no cowboys. Nothing. There was a statue of a giant bull and a wax museum that was closed. That was it.

While me and KP attempted to form choppy sentences around our slack jaws and wha? Wha?’s our surprisingly well-versed and knowledgeable tour guide (ps- Kristen and Ryan, while our impression of the city is less than sterling, you guys were great. Thanks for the spaghetti!) explained that during the seventies (as if Dodge had anything going for it even back then) the city tore down all that history because the buildings were “old”. Duh. Drive to Wichita and go to the local Barnes & Noble and find a dictionary (they are in reference, by the way, under the sub-heading of “dictionaries”) and look up the word “HISTORY” (hiss-tor-ee) and see what it says. Shit, use the Oxford or the Webster’s College, or even the Webster’s for kids. I guarantee the word “old” will be in every description.

Why the hell would you guys tear down a great piece of American history just to build a downtown equivalent of a strip mall full of dry-cleaners and un-busy Chinese restaurants? Come on! This is Gunsmoke for chrissakes! Own that shit! Dodge City, in addition to having the two largest meat-packing plants in the country, boasts also a summer full of giant rodeos and Frontier Days. Where the hell is all that cool stuff? Imagine: a young goat roper new to the circuit, no older than 18, thumbs hooked casually in his Wrangler’s, fresh from FriedChickensdale, Oklahoma or something, living out his life-long dreams of being a rodeo star and arriving all starry-eyed to the famous Dodge City only to see, well, this:










How I weep for the little guy, I really do.

Back to the action: me and KP sitting in the back seat of Kristen’s car wiping tears of epic disappointment out of our eyes and struggling to come to terms with the fact that, along with the wild wild west, the macho man is but a relic of better times. This means bar time. For real. Here’s how all that went, we arrive back at Lisa’s new pad and they decide that they don’t know where any bars are and don’t know any cowboys and don’t trust the Mexicans or something, so we’ll just drink at home. I’m already crushed with fatigue and disappointment to the point of submission, and KP is road-weary from nine hours of eyeball-bleeding boredom but trying to hide her anguish for Lisa’s sake, so we give in. We know how to get a party started, it’s me and KP, right? Me and Ryan get in the car (nine PM, mind you, not late at all) to track down some margaritas, only to find that Wal Mart sells no booze, had no mixers, and no liquor stores were open past eight. So sorry for bailing like we did, Lisa, but we were out of there by six am. Verdict?

D O D G E C I T Y S U C K S.


KP pontificates:

Words on Kansas (written on our way the hell out of Dodge):

*sighs * alright, Kansas.
little towns in the middle of nowhere?
that’s just how it is.
(shakes her head in disgust)

Witchita to Dodge City,
started to get excited.
Front street.
This is front street.
My heart hit
the floor.
All the Gunsmoke, all the Wyatt Earp,
red pink sunset over the milo,
Did you see that cow?
It’s leg, is just
flopping there.
It is so sad.

But after three hours of dawn over the prairie and a highway that doesn’t curve and no coffee or decent radio stations and a mood that could be best described as “cranky”, we did find one of those sweet road-side stops with a sign for “five-legged cow”. You know we had to stop. We actually waited for the place to open, paid the man six dollars and it was worth every penny. If you find yourself ever on I 80 in the middle of Kansas en route to Colorado, do yourself a favor and visit this roadside haven of bizarre, macabre, and weird. That guy was visibly crazy.

Here is a (bulleted) list of things that we saw at this particular trap:

 Raccoons
 Foxes
 A box of giant, real live rattlesnakes, kept indoors
 A two-headed calf, dead


 A five legged cow, alive


 A SIX legged cow, alive
 The worlds largest prairie dog, plaster
 The worlds cutest piggies, alive
 Exotic chickens
 Peacock
 Buffalo
 Wart-hog pig tusk thing, gross
 Jackalope, dead
 Coffee cup shaped like a lady’s jubbly
 Widdle goaties and birdies
 Two truckers from Jersey who were about as weirded out as we were

KP wasn’t afraid of the gigantic, sticky black cow tongue as I was, and she was way more into feeding the little goats and piggies and things, but she’s just cool like that and I’m a little nervous around animal mouths. But we made it, we hit the Colorado state line only a short time later, headed for adventure, mystery, the hottest server ever, and Oktoberfest. More to come when KP and Stef hit DENVER. Never go to Dodge City on purpose, please.