Oklahoma, Where the Wind Comes Sweeping Down the Plain

I like to think about these daily posts throughout the day. Typically, I start to notice various trends annd then a theme emerges. Today was half in the car and half on the bike. This morning when I woke up, I heard something on the roof of the hotel. I was on the 4th floor Of a 4-story hotel in Amarillo. A persistent, loud, steady noise that I first thought were raindrops. But there was no rain in the forecast. As I looked out the window, I saw the issue - trees bending sideways from the howling wind. The wind must have been whipping around whatever debris was on the hotel roof. I went outside in my shorts and t-shirt to put my bike in the back of the Suburban I had rented and just about froze. A quick look at the weather app showed 48 degrees and winds of 24 mph gusting to 36. I managed to get back inside before my not-so-svelte body got blown down to Lubbock. The theme for today was already percolating.

After breakfast and a quick stop at the van to drop off a pack I wasn’t going to use, I headed for OKC. As I drove across the bleak, barren landscape of the Texas panhandle, struggling to keep a full-size SUV from being blown into the next lane or onto the shoulder, I quickly realized that all I had to look forward to between now and Tuesday was turning around and coming the other direction on my bike. I wasn’t exactly cursing Dan for picking the most boring road in America to travel, but I was thinking that when this is all done in a couple years, I get to pick the next trip we do!

The drive went without incident and Dan arrived more or less on time and intact. He reassembled his bike and we headed out from the OKC rental car center a bit before 2. We rode 30 miles north and then west, into a wind coming out of the … northwest! The first 10 or so were more or less straight into it, and the last chunk had the wind more or less across - pushing us from the right-hand edge of a largely shoulder-less highway towards the lanes of traffic. We survived.

One of the other things I thought about today was assigning things into two categories - expected and unexpected.

UNEXPECTED

Yukon, Oklahoma - home of Garth Brooks, Garth Brooks Avenue, and a huge water tower talking about Garth Brooks

Also in Yukon, both bolts holding Dan’s rack to the frame of his bike somehow simultaneously unthreaded themselves and popped out, resulting in the rack pivoting backwards and his saddlebags dragging on the ground behind him. Also, the bolts vanished. The fix was to remove a water bottle cage and use those bolts to reattach his rack. It held up for the rest of the ride

A lake in Oklahoma

EXPECTED

The wind

The view

The row of non-denominational mega churches, right next to one another on a stretch of rode - near Yukon. Dan counted 6.

The Camaro or some other muscle car revving it’s firecracker engine as it passed by us and then seeing the decal that said “Bubba” in the back window.

The massive cross (30’ high?) at some rest area in the Texas panhandle (milepost 112 if you’ever have the misfortune of driving this section of I-40 and needing to stop for a quick prayer.). We will see this again in a few days. Depending on the wind direction, a stop might be in order.

A special bonus from last night - apparently I was staying next door to a place called the Big Texan. Home of the “Free 72-oz steak”. My guess is you have to eat the whole thing to get it for free, otherwise it probably costs you $100. Since I’m trying to cut back on red meat consumption, I decided to save it for another time.

Squint and you can see the kneeling cowboy with his horse over by the cross on the right. I’m no biblical scholar but Dan assured me that there was no discussion of horseback riding in the Bible, even though the sign just to the left of the tree might imply otherwise.

Just verifying we were on the right road.