I am in Wichita, Kansas for business and decide this is a great place to continue my weekend road trips. (Wichita is a great, little city, by the way, and I’ll tell you more about it in another post.) Normally, when I take my weekend road trips, the plan is to have as little of a plan as possible. A general time frame—be back in time to report to work Monday morning—and a general direction: go west! Then it is all about taking whatever road looks interesting.

However, this trip is starting in the early morning of Independence Day and going on through the weekend. A motel room will be very hard to get on the fly so a few days ago, I guesstimated where I might be at the end of the first day—Dodge City, Kansas—and reserved a room. (After endless calls, I literally reserved the last room in Dodge.)

Even though I rely mostly on a GPS to get me home, I always like to have a map. The hotel I am currently at doesn’t have one but I tell myself I’ll pick one up at a gas station along the way.

Taking the byways, I go through El Dorado and wind up through the Flint Hills in eastern Kansas. I practically have the road to myself. Wide, open spaces, mile after mile. It’s easy to forget that places like this exist when you have been living in a crowded, busy city for a while. It does my heart good to see nothing but sweet, fertile fields in every direction and breathe in all that fresh air.

I read about a ghost town in Lyon County and decide to find it. This is a bad idea for two reasons. One, I have a terrible sense of direction, and two, I have a reckless sense of adventure. Of course, the GPS won’t find a ghost town so I punch in a few landmarks near the supposed site and figure the GPS will keep me from getting too lost.

Wrong.

After an hour and a half, I am so turned around that I have no clue where I am, and I haven’t seen another living soul during this whole leg of the trip. The road turns to gravel and then dirt. I decide to give up on the ghost town and use the GPS to get me back to a main road but that thing is more confused than I am. It tells me to take a left into the middle of a cornfield and then to bear right into a pond. Remember that map I was supposed to pick up at a gas station?

My frustrated GPS drains the phone battery dead. I have a house charger in my backpack to recharge at the hotel, but it’s not going to do me any good out here. I shut down the engine and walk around a bit. There are thousands of grasshoppers flitting around. They land on my shirt, in my hair. It’s kind of creepy and I think this would make a good beginning to a horror story. I start jotting things down on the notepad that’s always in my back pocket, imaging what kind of weirdness could unfold.

Before I creep myself out too much, I get moving again assuming that this road has to come out somewhere. I have a quarter tank of gas left so there’s time…but the clock is ticking. Even before I started looking for the ghost town, I hadn’t seen a gas station in a long while.

Somehow or another, I manage to get back to a main road and am whipping west across the prairies, looking for a gas station. Thankfully, I find one in time, fill up, try to buy a map and a DC phone charger. No luck. So I take my wall charger into the men’s room and plug in over the sink. I pull up a map showing me that I am a long, long way from Dodge City. I look up the number of the motel there and try to cancel the room.

I tell the girl at the front desk my situation and in my friendliest voice, ask if I can cancel my reservation without penalty.

“Ah,” she says, “I don’t know.”

“Well,” I say, trying to pretend this isn’t a weird response, “Do you think you could find out?”

“Ah,” she says again, “I’m not sure.” Then, without excusing herself, she starts talking to someone in the background. “Some guy wants to cancel his room for the night,” she says to whoever she’s talking to.

“Is he on hold?”

“No.”

“Well, put him on hold.”

And then—without warning—I am hearing the muzak version of “Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head.”

She finally comes back with, “If someone comes in wanting your room, we will cancel it.”

“But that doesn’t help me,” I say, being patient, “I need to know, yes, you will cancel it without charging me or no, you won’t.”

She repeats what I have said to the person in the background and he says, “The policy says he can’t cancel this late. He has to pay whether he stays or not.”

Great.

I think about just eating the cost of the room, but I am not likely to find another vacancy on the fourth of July so I decide to make a run for it. Before I do, I choose the least sad looking piece of pizza circulating under a heat lamp, wolf it down with a Coke, and get back on the road.

It is a long ride. But I have a lot of thoughts in my head to sort through and this is just the way to do it.