Greenwich is many things.
Greenwich is a district of South East London, a neighborhood of Manhattan, a town in Australia, a few towns in Canada, two handfuls of towns in the United States, an island in Antarctica, and a pizza chain in the Philippines.
But it is also a road that runs through Wichita, Kansas.

I got the car and went to have a burger from Sonic today:

This is a place where you don’t go in to eat. You just stay in your car, and some chicks on rollerblades are supposed to get you your food.

Well, this time it wasn’t a chick, it was a dude, and he wasn’t on rollerblades either:

But that was okay, because it’s the food that matters, and both the burger and the fries were freakin’ awesome!

Then I thought to myself: while the others are out golfing (yawn!), why don’t I drive to the state of Oklahoma? And then another thing dawned on me: Oklahoma is in the South – I am on Greenwich Road, which is going South. So why don’t I just STAY on this street and see if it takes me to Oklahoma?

Well, the first place I got to didn’t exactly look like Oklahoma. In fact, it didn’t even look like America to me:

It was a Laotian Buddhist temple!

Suddenly this dude came running out of one of the buildings, and he seemed to take quite an interest in what I was doing. I couldn’t really explain myself to him, since he didn’t seem to speak much English, but we eventually resorted to smiling, taking pictures, and saying “Okay!”:

It was great.

Would you have expected a Buddhist temple behind a driveway like this?

…

I had to make another stop when I saw a German flag at another driveway:

A friendly couple appeared:

They told me there was a foreign exchange student from Germany living on one of these farms, but he was apparently in Florida at the time.

…

So I continued driving.

At one point Greenwich turned into a gravel road:

…and then it disappeared altogether:

…

Once I stopped at a farm to ask for directions, and that’s where I met Roy:

Awesome dude. Does all of the following: Pond Digging, Sand/Gravel, Hauling, Fill Dirt, Building Pads, Lagoons, Rock

Oh, and he was so friendly!

Roy and me talked for a while, and he showed me the greens he was growing:

…and one of the pigs he was raising:

And since we had been talking so much about the quality of life in the countryside, he invited me into his house and prepared a bit of his home-made sausage for me to take home.

So for the rest of the day, I would be driving around with a little bucket that contained ice cubes and the sausage (you can see it in my right hand on the picture), and I kept thinking that this was just like the way it had been in China – the folks in the countryside were just so hospitable and nice!

…

After that, I lost Greenwich road, but I figured I would just follow another road in its general direction:

I asked for directions at a liquor store:

And then Gary came in:

He was just going to grab some beer, but eventually stayed and chatted with me for quite a while. He had been to the Oktoberfest in Munich before, and he would always say things like: “You go down that street, and then bitte nach links!” – and then we would crack up and almost die laughing.

He advised me to stop at a place called the Boxcar. It was supposed to be a bar somewhere in the middle of nowhere. When I asked him what was so good about it, he said: “Very rural! Yes that’s it, rural!” And then he laughed.

…

It took me a while (and the help of a kid on a motorcycle) to find the Boxcar:

Unfortunately, it wasn’t open yet, but there was garage next to it, so I decided to stop there.

That’s where I met Jerry:

The door on Jerry’s garage has a sign that says “OL Man’s garage” – a gift from his kids.

I lingered around the garage for a while:

…and then Jerry got out the lawnmower:

This thing is no ordinary lawnmower. It does more than 40 mph and they use it to race out here:

Pure awesomeness!

…

At some point after that I somehow managed to find Greenwich road again:

And it took me to the place where it stopped for good:

People had told me about this – the roads of Kansas and Oklahoma apparently didn’t connect. So this was as far as Greenwich would ever take me, and from here on, there would be no way any more for me to chat up people by saying stuff like “hey, I live on Greenwich too – 70 miles from here!”

Not much to look at out here. Once there was an old tire:

…but most of the time it was just the beautiful golden table cloth of the Great Plains:

“Am I in Oklahoma?” I asked this guy who was doing some obscure work in his fields:

He said yes, and when I asked him if there were any Indians around here, he told me to try my luck in one of their casinos next to the highway. So I turned around and found the highway, and then there it was:

…the sign that said it. I was finally in Oklahoma!

It didn’t take me long to find the casino:

There were no Indians around anywhere, but I decided to take out a Jackson and lose it anyway, just for the heck of it:

…but they wouldn’t let me. The bouncer was a very nice guy (of German origin, and just like Gary from the liquorstore, he had been to Germany too), and he told me that there was no way they could let me in without a passport. And since I had initially set out to get a burger at Sonic, I hadn’t thought about taking my passport along. Fuckedifuck!

“Win or lose?” I asked some other people on my way out. They were also leaving, and their answer was short: “Lose.”

“Lucky you, they wouldn’t even LET me lose!” I cried, but it suddenly didn’t feel so bad anymore.

…

I drove through some of Bryson’s Small Town America after that:

It seemed like towns were dying even faster than in Europe over here:

A bit creepy…

…

I passed an Indian school called Chilocco, but there was no way I could get near it:

People had been telling me all kinds of things about this place. Why was it locked? Why couldn’t anybody go there?

A kid on a motorcycle who had shown me the way to the Boxcar had said that there had been murders between the Indians before, so the government had shut down the school. But a 1/4 Indian friend of Jerry’s at the OL Man’s Garage had told me that this was total bull, in fact there hadn’t even been any murders, but it was the FBI that had claimed the school property as a training facility for anti-terrorist measures. …and then my German bouncer friend at the casino had in turn dismissed this piece of information and said that they had simply run out of Indian students a while back, so they had decided to close down the school.

I didn’t know what to think.

But I decided not to bother. I had made it to the end of Greenwich road, I had met a bunch of interesting people, and I had even managed to not lose twenty bucks in Oklahoma. What more could I even ask for?

Right, a taco:

And just when I had installed myself with my serving of fast Mexican food, Josh and Britney appeared:

They were super friendly and we talked for about two hours. About Kansas. About Oklahoma. About Indians. About casinos. About roads. About food. About the stupid Second Amendment. About an awesome thing called Demolition Derby. About the value of being young and enjoying it.

It was a perfect way to wrap up this wonderful trip.

When we parted, I took one last picture of the restaurant in the evening sun:

Then I turned on a CD of Indian music I had bought a few days ago, sipped on my Dr. Pepper and drove the remaining eighty something miles through the darkness that was falling on the beautiful Great Plains.

It was magic.

…oh, and this is what my trip looked like on a map:

Greenwich on larger map

Driving is so much easier than walking.

Soundtrack: Andrew Vasques – “Until I Return”