Welcome to Kansas City, Missouri!

This be the holy land. On the day i walked into Kansas City, fifteen hundred miles from home, the Royals put up 17 runs on their hated in-state rival St. Louis Cardinals. Here is Mecca. If it hadn't already been done by the greatest one to ever play here, i might get down on my hands and knees to kiss the ground. We've made it. Well, to Kansas City, at least.

And who could ask for more? Kansas City boasts the cleanest drinking water in the nation, more boulevards than anywhere in the world other than Paris, and more fountains than anywhere in the world besides Rome. And who gives a pope's crap about those places anyway? This is the birthplace of Charlie Parker and the Kansas City Jazz scene. Hemingway wrote for the newspaper during the first World War. Disney opened his first animation studio here. Plus, Burt Bacharach and Jean Harlow, icing on the cake.

This is Dan Quisenberry. He played for a team called the Kansas City Royals, a ball club that replaced the Athletics when they abandoned the city of fountains for greener pastures in, ahem, Oakland, in 1969. Ten years later, this photo was taken of Quisenberry delivering his famous "submarine" slider in a powder blue uniform, most likely with the sound of the BeeGee's welcoming him to the mound every inning.

Here i am, fast asleep in the back seat of a speeding Swedish automobile, bound for Kansas City in 2006. I was born in 1984. I took my first steps the following year, possibly to the sound of the announcer's voice on the television proclaiming that for the first time in history, the Kansas City Royals had won the World Series. The rest of my life has been a snowballing realization that my destiny and purpose in life, shrouded in mystery as they might be, are inseperably bonded to this organization, who have gradually and quite sadly slipped into the category of lowest common denominator in Major League Baseball. Not for long, though.

A team is being assembled out there of the finest young individuals in America, emerging from adolescent comas to produce writing and artwork of the highest caliber. This new movement will soon be at the vanguard of American progress, paving the way for generations to come. These kids are dedicated like nothing you've ever witnessed, and soon you will know them by name. They will write for your paper. They will serve your drinks. They will control the future of culture itself in the 21st century, and literally have you by the balls. They are all very real Royals fans.

People never stop asking me, what's this whole Royals thing about, anyway? And while i'm tiring of the half-hour version, i can offer a few hints. It's about this:

and this:and this.

Two Day's Distance: 14.37 miles

Total Distance Covered: 1,508.66 miles

Kansas City, Missouri