Trip to Wichita Kansas

My buddy Josh called me Monday afternoon and asked me if I wanted to run up to Kansas to pick up the dirt bike I had bought recently, but had not yet picked up. We were supposed to meet his friend in Austin Texas cause it is closer but every time we had the chance to do it something came up, so we figured it would be best to run up and grab it as soon as possible. We decided to make a run for it as fast as we could, cause he had to go offshore Wednesday morning. Kansas is 12+ hours away so I thought he would want to leave right away, but he told me, we should leave later in the evening. Figuring we weren’t in a rush I figured it would be the perfect time to get a new stereo for my truck cause mine sucked and the speakers were all blown.

I went to best buy and bought a cd player, speakers, and some hardware I would need, but they didn’t have the rear speakers so I checked out circuit city, but they didn’t have the right size either, so I will just have to get them at a later date. I stopped by my house and grabbed a change of clothing just in case we needed colder weather clothes, since it was about 70 degrees in Lafayette and a lot colder in Kansas. I was also laughing at the lack of planning and the quickness with which we decided to do this little trip. I showed up at Josh’s and started working on the stereo, everything was going pretty smooth until we found out the guy had given me the wrong connector for my stereo so we or should I say Josh had to connect each wire by hand, which really blows and takes a lot longer.

After the whole radio fiasco, we finally hit the road at about 9:30 at night. I made it about ten minutes down the road and was pulled over and given a ticket for speeding. Wasn’t too bothered by it sense the tenting on my windows is illegal and my inspection sticker is a couple months out of date, none of which he noticed. I asked him if there was a way to make it not go on my insurance and he told me just to talk to the court house and it should be fine, so I shook his hand, thanked him and was back on my way. Was another one of those you aren’t from down here are you experiences, got “the look” when I told him I was a commercial diver. Drove out of Louisiana and threw most of Texas before switching out with Josh.

Shortly after Josh started driving we started hitting snow, I told him I switched at the right time. We were told by Josh’s friends that the weather conditions were supposed to be pretty crazy but new that we wouldn’t care either way. Well so much for trying to sleep, it’s a little hard when it feels like your on a boat going down the road. The snow kept building more and sticking on the road, it was pretty slick so we put Katrina (the nick name of my truck) into 4 wheel drive and she started handling way better, we decided she likes it dirty. It was pretty exciting going down the road, not really too much because of the weather but more so because of the jackasses on the road and how crappy most of them drive in the snow. There was probably about a one to two feet on the road. Josh is from Alaska so it wasn’t really anything new for him and we actually had a pretty good time during small breaks to whip some doughnuts around.

We got into Wichita around 10 o’clock and we went over to Josh’s friend’s dad’s house and picked up a mountain bike Josh had stored there. Then we headed back to Wichita and Josh’s buddy came drove down from Manhattan, KS (about 2 hours north) with my dirt bike. We went and got something to eat and sat around talking for a little bit. We loaded the dirt bike up and got back on the road.

Conditions weren’t much different coming back, still pretty crappy all the way threw to Dallas. The only thing that made things worse were the amount of cars on the road, because it was the middle of the day. So we had to fight traffic the majority of the way and got stuck behind tons of slow moving vehicles. That’s when we started dropping the hammer and passing as many groups of people as possible, it wasn’t too hard because everyone stayed in the same lane fallowing each other. So we would go into the “worse” lane and broadie past them. After passing groups of people like this we would always look back and see a bunch of people trying to do what we had just done, it was pretty funny, guess everyone was afraid to give it a shot until they saw it done. I wasn’t too tired driving from Kansas to Texas because my adrenaline was going the whole time having to concentrate the whole time.

We made it back to Louisiana around 2 in the morning which isn’t too bad of timing considering the crappy road conditions. All and all it was a pretty sweet trip nothing really bad happened and I have my dirt bike in Louisiana now (will have to put pics up) so I can learn to ride. We also stayed in our shorts the entire trip and I even managed to where flip flops the whole time, thought my toes would fall off while loading the bike though.