SUMMER SPORTS CLASSIC II

Stuck in Bucklin with a Diesel-Filled Corolla

How my brother, best friend, and I got in — and out — of Dodge City for the trip of a lifetime

My brother and I stopping for a photo in Sedona (Photo property of author).

Bucklin, Kansas (yes, it’s a real place).

How on earth did we get stuck in Bucklin of all places? I didn’t even like saying it.

Bucklin.

It was smooth sailing from Columbus, through Cincinnati; then weaving through St. Louis in the wee hours of the morning, and cruising through Kansas City at daybreak — followed by four or five (can’t remember how long, but man it was long) hours of manure farms and open plains.

It was as if we were driving on a rolling conveyor belt with the image of a farm next to us on a rotating sheet of paper, like how they filmed movies in the old days (or maybe I just saw it in a cartoon).

Manure…cow…silo…repeat…manure…cow…silo…repeat. All. Day. Long.

We peeled into a two-pump gas station for some fuel and bladder relief — and to take a breather from driving all night through most of the Midwest.

Bladder emptied, I opened the door to the backseat and got myself ready for a few more hours of cow — manure — silo, but as soon as I buckled in, my brother and our best friend Joey looked like they saw a dead man.

“Let’s go, boys,” I said with a dumb grin.

“We can’t,” Joey replied coldly.

Thinking he was joking, I laughed like an idiot and said, “Stop playing around, man, let’s go!”

Joey snapped back, “I said we can’t!”

My grin turned to stone.

“We accidentally filled the tank with diesel fuel,” Joey continued, “The minute we start the engine, that fuel’s gonna destroy the car.”

“Where the heck are we?” I asked.

“Some place called Bucklin,” Joey said.

Crap. Our trip out west was already setting us up for a cruel summer, and we just got started.

We put the car in neutral and pushed it off to the side of the gas station, then we hit the phones like brokers on Wall Street trying to find a way out of this mess.

Of course, I had no service in the lovely town of Bucklin — I had Sprint. This isn’t a plug for Verizon, and I’m not getting paid to say this, of course, but you know those commercials where someone’s car breaks down in the middle of nowhere? And the Verizon guy shows up from behind a bush or something, wearing khakis? And you’re all like, “Whoa, where’d he come from?”

Yeah, those commercials are 100% accurate.

Well, the Verizon guy didn’t show up for real. Joey was the only one with cell service, and he was also the only one who had Verizon.

So, while Bucklin’s finest (the gas station clerks) were busy trying to siphon the diesel fuel out of Joey’s Toyota Corolla with an old hose they cut, we called the one person that we knew for certain could get us out of here: Joey’s mom, Jane.

If I were stuck in the Alaskan bush surrounded by grizzly bears lathered head to toe in honey, and I had one call to make, Jane would be the one I’d count on to save my skin.

In less than 15 minutes, Jane had arranged a tow truck driver, whom she already knew on a first-name basis, to pick us up from Dodge City, Kansas, which happened to be only 30 minutes away.

Her calm, assuring voice sounded like warm cookies from the oven — but not just any cookies, her cookies; the ones we devoured on the kitchen island since we were eight years old.

“Okay, boys,” she said as we huddled together and listened through Joey’s speaker phone, “Vinny is coming to pick you boys up and take you to a Toyota dealership in Dodge City. They should be able to drain the tank there and get you back on the road.”

Jane for president, ladies and gentlemen. I’m fully convinced she could solve world peace, end hunger everywhere, and find a sustainable source of natural energy — all while baking a batch of chocolate chip cookies.

While many folks in history spent a good amount of time getting out of Dodge, we were lucky to finally be in it.

The mechanic at Toyota applauded us for not turning the car on and said all he had to do was drain the fuel tank, then we’d be on our way. However, the only downside was that our trip would be put on hold for a couple of days. The trip we’d been planning for six months. The trip of a lifetime out west to Sedona, Arizona.

While the delay was disappointing, we made the most of it by exploring the town and enjoying its rich history. Being the history buffs my brother and I are, it was surreal to walk the same ground as Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday — two Wild West lawmen who became household names in the once-revered boom town.

We noticed several radioactive symbols around town, which I now know were because Dodge City has been selected as one of three cities in Kansas to monitor and track ambient radiation levels in the United States.

As cool and interesting as those two facts were, we didn’t come all this way to see a statue of Doc Holiday and sleep in a Super 8 Motel — we were nearly halfway to paradise, and it was time to get moving.

As we finally neared our campground in Sedona — the first destination on our westward pilgrimage — Joey turned the corner to reveal the promised land: a vast expanse of forest trees that rolled up into the horizon.

We couldn’t believe it. All the miles. All the car naps. All the Chipotle pit stops. All the in-car flatulence. It was all worth it now. We were sailors stranded in the doldrums for days who finally heard “Land Ho!” from the crow’s nest.

Joey smiled ear to ear as my brother and I soaked in the scenery while we all sang “Fly Me to the Moon” by Frank Sinatra — the one and only CD we brought. We had listened to it front to back a dozen times already, but this time sounded sweeter than ever before.

We were on the moon, no doubt about it.

The Eagle has landed!

For the next three days, we hiked all around Sedona, seeing some of the more touristy sites, and then moving off the beaten path to conquer a more extreme ascension. Nothing beats hiking in the natural world. Nothing.

As magnificent as our campground was, the only downside was that it didn’t have a shower. And after hiking in the 100-degree Sedona desert, we were in desperate need of some hygiene upkeep. To put it plainly: we smelled like hot garbage. And we were all sunburnt. But no one was more burnt than Joey, who thought it would be a good idea to hike with his shirt off in direct sunlight.

We examined Joey’s blistered, sun-poisoned back and searched for the nearest truck stop to clean ourselves up.

As far as truck stops go, I wasn’t expecting much, but I didn’t realize we were heading to the most popular truck stop in the whole state — complete with marble bathrooms. The best part? It only cost us ten bucks.

After I finished rinsing off, I met my brother out in the waiting area. We knew Joey would be a while since he had to clean and disinfect his blistered back.

So, we joined the rest of the truckers as they sat on leather couches watching Wicked Tuna.

Clearly, we were the odd men out. It was as if we stumbled into a rugged western saloon from out of town, and we immediately caught the attention of the ten burly truckers sitting around the television.

“What you boys doin’ out here?” One of them said bluntly.

“Just on a trip from Ohio to see Sedona and Colorado,” I replied.

The trucker paused for a moment.

“So, this ’posed to be the trip of a lifetime?” He asked.

“Yeah, something like that.”

“Right on, then.”

We spent another day in Sedona hiking wherever we pleased. We always made a point to make the hikes our own, taking safety into account, of course. Alright, maybe we could’ve been a little safer. Maybe we shouldn’t have taken the “Wilderness Trail” where my brother, Jake, sat on a pile of fire ants. But hey, what can you expect from a bunch of college-aged kids with wanderlust?

We ended our time in Sedona with a nice evening dinner, which was made complete with our incredible waiter, Buck (surely named after our favorite town in Kansas), who we still talk about to this day. His character, demeanor, and overall passion for life shone through every conversation, and he truly made us feel at home.

We thought it’d be a good idea to make another shower stop back at the most luxurious truck stop in America. After all, we were going to spend the next several hours making our way to the Grand Canyon, and then onward to Colorado Springs.

Photo of the Grand Canyon. (Photo property of author).

Colorado Springs opened up the door to bouldering — something we hadn’t even heard of before this trip. As we perused our way through Garden of the Gods park, we gawked at the climbers navigating their way up the rock formations that scraped the sky at just over 300 feet tall.

My hands were sweating just watching them from the ground.

Not only did we lack the equipment and experience for such an extreme climb, but you also couldn’t pay me enough money to even attempt it.

However, we noticed several people free climbing large boulders throughout the park, with foam mats strategically placed to break their fall should they slip. But even then, the boulders were only 10–15 feet high. These presented just enough of a challenge to be fun and required only beginner-level experience.

We were hooked from the first climb.

The natural rock formations engaged all of our senses, including analytical problem-solving skills. Each rock was like solving a puzzle.

Even after just a few climbs, we started to really appreciate climbing as a sport, and this mild obsession carried us home to a local bouldering gym.

We rounded out our trip in Colorado Springs with a train ride up to Pikes Peak. Going from 60-degree sunshine to 30-degree snow-capped mountains was surreal. Our tour guide shared with us that explorers used Pikes Peak as a means of getting the lay of the land. As I peered out to the horizon, I imagined the frontiersman who took in the same sight hundreds of years before me.

The guide also said that if you looked hard enough, you could actually see into Kansas (no thanks!).

Picture from the top of Pikes Peak. (Photo property of author).

Something aches in a young man’s soul to see the natural terrain in its rawest form, to escape the concrete confines of our urban dwellings and live wild and free — to quench the thirst for adventure.

We got all of that and more on this trip, and we learned valuable life lessons along the way — things we couldn’t learn in our college classrooms.

We felt first-hand the valley of despair in the flat plains of Bucklin, Kansas, soaking our sorrows in a crummy Super 8 Motel. And then we experienced the triumph of making it to the top of the world at Pikes Peak — all within just a couple of weeks.

And that’s life, right? One day you're on top of the world, and the next you’re sadly staring at a llama while two boys from Bucklin, Kansas, are siphoning diesel fuel out of your Toyota Corolla (unsuccessfully).

From valley to peak and everything in between.

We drove hundreds of miles, stayed in sketchy hotels, including the Little Americana Mesa Verde Inn, where the manager told us over and over that it, in fact, was not cockroach-infested (yeah, sure, buddy), met strange characters, and slept in a tent together where we laughed ourselves to sleep every night.

We’ve all been sucked into the vortex of life with families, kids, and our nine-to-five (all of which we love and adore).

But I’m glad we took advantage of the time we had to share an experience we’ll carry with us for the rest of our lives.

My wife and I spent our first anniversary in Sedona, and it was even more beautiful than I remembered. We loved the name Sedona so much that we decided that it would be our firstborn daughter’s name.

It’s the only place that could even come close to matching her beauty.

Thank you for reading my story.