USA Centre The next stop was Lebanon. There was a reason I had come to this nowhere town apart from the fact that it borders US 36. About four miles north of the town is the geographic centre of the lower 48 states of the USA. As the sign explains, if you had a perfectly flat, rigid pancake in the shape of the 48 states and put it a pencil underneath the spot four miles north of Lebanon, the pancake would balance. I rode to the spot marked by a stone bea-
con. Nearby are a little white chapel and an abandoned motel. The crowds anticipated never arrived, and the centre of the USA is only a lonely, cold, windblown kernel in the cornfields of Kansas. All this time I was alone in the middle of
the USA, but as I was leaving, a car arrived with two robust women in front and a little man in the back. Politely I asked the woman behind the wheel, “Would one of you be kind enough to take a photo of the beacon, the bike and me?” “It is too cold for my sister and me, but
Johnny can do it.” Johnny did not feel like being out in the
cold either, but the woman behind the wheel was not going to allow him any options. Reluctantly he got out of the car and took my camera. He aimed from vari- ous angles, handed the camera back to me and got back into the car. I thanked all of them profusely as they drove off. Only later did I discover that Johnny had
gone through the motions, but had not taken a single photo. I don’t blame him - he had to rebel a little somehow. All along the road were signs of past
glory and of being just abandoned. Homes that had been perfectly serviceable when the last resident left, lawnmowers and mopeds abandoned and covered by plants. Signs that advertised long forgotten attrac- tions. It was like the television show “The World after Humans” had come true in Kansas. I stopped for the night at Mankato,
another town that must have been a Hill Valley in the 1950s but was now showing signs of urban decay. Some of the aban- doned buildings had been torn down, but this did not improve the town. It was like a beautiful but aging actress smiling with every third tooth missing. There were the remnants of a staircase leading to nowhere, a newspaper stand that would never carry news again, and a phone booth where no phone would ever ring again. Oddly both Philipsburg and Mankato
had operating cinemas. Both were only open over weekends, but they did show relatively new films. Pity - if they had shown Citizen Kane or Casablanca, I would have stayed. The only restaurant I could find was
open only from 6 to 9 p.m., and only on Sat- urday night! While having supper, two BMW MOA members (the only members I met on the entire trip) came in. They were
(Left) A lonely road on the cold, windswept cornfields of Kansas. (Above) A roadside historical marker near Lebanon, Kansas.
September 2015 BMW OWNERS NEWS 83
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