Monday (Aug 8)
It’s starting to feel more “western” out here. The days are just as god-awful hot as they have been, but the nights are a little cooler, so I’m guessing less humidity. I slept great here.
Had a little drama making it to the freeway. I’m the kind of guy that loves taking the alternate route rather than the boring old big highway route. Sometimes the second choice route on Maps takes you down some pretty dicey roads. Today, my two-lane road kept getting narrower and hillier. Eventually there were a couple of four way stops where only one direction was paved, and that was NOT the direction Maps was telling me to go. I took that the paved road anyway, Maps be damned. All the roads are on a north-south, east-west grid, so I wasn’t gonna get lost … stuck or stranded or forced to backtrack 40 miles maybe, but not lost.
Eventually I did make it to I-40 down the road a ways. I need diesel, and lucked out that there was a pretty nice lunch place at that exit a little further into town. Very crowded, clearly the place to be in Okemah OK (give me a break on all the “Ok…” names around here).
Then back on I-40 through the heat of Oklahoma City to the Freightliner place to set up my van service. After a false start where I found my in the big rig service area I was gently directed across the street to where the amateurs in their pitiful little vehicles are serviced. They wrote me up for tomorrow, and boom! I’m loose on the big city with an afternoon and evening to kill. A very little bit of driving at 4pm rush hour driving convinced me that the smart play would be to get to a nice air conditioned library for a couple of hours and wait for the traffic to die down. Good plan!
I quite enjoyed the Bethany OK Library. It is a very diverse place, many ethnicities both in front and behind the counter. The last three weeks have been very, very white. Of course the focus of the trip was visiting white people, reunion-ing with the all-white high school Class of 1966 and visiting all my white relatives and friends, so that’s a lot of predisposition to whiteness. Anyway, I sat there watching the peaceful, at ease comings and goings and dealings, and wondered just where is Trump’s America of fearful whites? Not feeling the ‘fear of other’ at all, in a very red-state area.
Around 7 I decided it was safe to head out into the evening heat.
I’m pretty good at non-goal oriented driving, just tooling around to see what you can see. I cruised downtown, past Chesapeake Arena where the Thunder play, … where Kevin Durant USED to play :). Then was this interesting block of greenery and cool led lights, which turned out to be the Botanical Gardens. This is where I got my evening exercise, such as it was. The interior of the Gardens was closed for the night, but the exterior was really well done. For some reason I left my phone in the van, so I don’t have pictures, but take my word for it, it’s worth a visit if you’re in OKC.
I Yelped for a place to eat on the way home, but nothing struck me as being better than the Cracker Barrel, so around 9:30 I headed back to get there before closing.
WHUFU page for: Cracker Barrel
Quite user friendly! There are 8-9 spaces specifically marked out for RVs, and you just park there.
I parked under the tree at the edge and actually had a pleasant time. I felt safe and reasonably private, and it was surprisingly quiet in the morning.
tonight:
Quite user friendly! There are 8-9 spaces specifically marked out for RVs, and you just park there.
I parked under the tree at the edge and actually had a pleasant time. I felt safe and reasonably private, and it was surprisingly quiet in the morning.
Dinner was uneventful. It’s been a while, o I had forgotten the Cracker Barrel drill, where the actual entrance to the restaurant is in the far diagonal corner of the huge gift shop, so you have to navigate 60′ of knick-knack shelves to get to be seated. The servers are all relentlessly cheerful, but when I left the cashier was anything but pleasant. Oh well.
I take a little walk around the cheap motels and bank branches. Now it’s 11-ish. The night has cooled off some but the van is still very hot. It’s not buggy and there’s a little breeze, so I opened up all the van doors and windows vent (and all the cabinet doors inside) to try to get the vehicle down to ambient temperature. It’s very quiet and oddly private considering I’m in a parking lot by the freeway. Really very comfortable much to my surprise.
Tuesday
I seem to have slept surprisingly well for as hot as it is. Up by 8:30 and rolling soon after. I pulled into the Freightliner Service place around 9. It took them till 11-ish to get to my van, but they had good wifi, coffee, a/c, and the Olympics on tv so I was pretty happy just hanging out. I spent a productive 4 or so hours in that little room.
Unlike my all my previous Sprinter service experiences at Mercedes dealers, I was STILL happy after it was done and he handed me the bill. It was $200 pr $300 cheaper than it would have been at any Mercedes dealer I’ve been to in NorCal or Nevada. I also got straight answers and reasonable responses to little issues I’ve gotten the runaround on for the last five services. I hope I never have to go to a Mercedes dealer for service ever again.
Again, yelp showed me no better dining in this two-exit area than the Cracker Barrel, so back “home” one more time. Good food at good prices. The servers are maybe a little too chipper, and sadly the unpleasant woman doing cashier duty was there again, so I ended having a decent time and leaving on a sour note again.
There was an interesting-looking overland route past a reservoir that I had planned to take a couple of days ago, but sadly this morning I forgot about it so I just blasted southwest out of town on I-44 – oh well… My destination is Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge, which made a strong impression on me in 2002.
Pay my tolls, a couple of hours of freeway driving, then exit at Route 49. Take a chill break in the form of a Burger King milk shake. I have been moaning about hot days for weeks, but the forecast for the next two days here in Western Oklahoma is for nearly life-threatening heat. The Wildlife Refuge has a red alert! warning about the heat … awesome.
Now I am in the lovely grasslands I remember from last time.
WHUFU page for: Doris Campground
Very hot right now, but what a cool place. Tucked away in the scrub oak forest along the shores of this little CCC-made reservoir.
Few campers because it is so insanely HOT. The shade is a real attraction in this area. Also the shower!
tonight:
Very hot right now, but what a cool place. Tucked away in the scrub oak forest along the shores of this little CCC-made reservoir.
Few campers because it is so insanely HOT. The shade is a real attraction in this area. Also the shower!
I like my spot. Grateful for the meager shade provided by the scrub oaks. I can see the lake through the trees in one direction, can barely see the bathroom through the trees in the other. Time to deploy the hammock!
After hammock time I took an excellent little hike through the bottoms down by the lake, then back up the hill to where I could maximize my sky for sunset. The moon is almost half full, so the next week will be the prime “walking in the dark” nights that I love so welll!
Wednesday
A little groggy this morning. It never got cool enough for sleeping last night. I believe as good as it got was 82° inside and 79° outside. There was a little sprinkle of rain this morning which was a bit of a relief. My big decision is whether to backtrack 20 miles to Lawton for coffee or press on 80 or so miles to where I cross the interstate and there will hopefully be enough civilization for wifi. Lawton wins. I’m not in a hurry, remember?
Lawton is home to Fort Sill. I drove along the northern edge of that gigantic place last night. Beautiful waving prairie grass extending to the hills on the left, beautiful waving prairie grass behind an 8′ tall fence topped with barbed wire extending to the horizon on the right. Anyway, there’s been a few fighter jets, some deep percussive booms, and a lot random whiny machine noises to remind me that it’s there.
Fort Sill is HUGE. In consequence Lawton is a pretty big town, with that kind utilitarian-ugly feel that military base towns often have. Can’t say I particularly enjoy it. I do find a very nice coffee shop in an old building, and a sandwich shop that makes huge sandwiches on the way out of town, so I will have to give props to Lawton, A for utility, C for aesthetics.
Back to Wichita Mountains to drive the length of the NWR. What a beautiful place! Take a break at a picnic area by a little lake where I devour a quarter of the giant $15 sando I bought in Lawton (15/4 = a bargain lunch at $3.75!). A gentle rain starts, which noticeably cools things off a bit.
It has been my experience that no matter where you cross the United States or Canada there will always be a Kansas; that is to say at least a couple of hundred miles of flat, featureless nothing landscape to be gotten through. That terrain feature extends very far north – on my epic trans-Canada trip in 1975 I discovered that Saskatchewan is Kansas North.
I had hopes of escaping it on this trip, but today is the day it turns out, driving northeast from Lawton to the western edge of the state is …. flat, boring nothingness. Actually it’s not quite as featureless as the real Kansas. There is a little undulation to the flatness, so that every now and then you crest a shallow hill that offers an amazing view of the rest of the flatness.Going to Wichita Mountains had taken me a little farther south than I wanted, so today is zigging north then zagging west, on the rectangular grid of roads that always happens on the prairie.
There really isn’t much out here, including phone reception. When I do get some I find that my best change for a restaurant is when my zig-zagging takes me across I-40 … which in mid-late afternoon brings me to the deeply weird Cowboy Cafe in Elk City. I had this very odd Twin Peaks feeling, where the waitress and the other diners were all in on the secret but not me.
Then due north then due west aiming for Black Kettle National Grassland. I am stressing about my almost empty gas tank, so I give myself a little peace of mind by taking a six mile detour to the town of Cheyenne to fill ‘er up. Funny little prairie town in the middle of the grassland, old school gas pumps where you pay inside, and a couple of giggly teenage girls manning the register. Kind of a nice detour really. Then due north to my campground.
WHUFU page for: Black Kettle Campground
Just a parking area with trees and picnic tables. I enjoyed it here. The water spigot is 40' from the lot in a field and looks like it might be dicey, but the water was delicious!
tonight:
Just a parking area with trees and picnic tables. I enjoyed it here. The water spigot is 40' from the lot in a field and looks like it might be dicey, but the water was delicious!
Took a few minutes to get the place figured out. At first I thought camping was in the boat launch parking lot, but then I followed the other road a while to find a lovely little picnic area just over the hill, with shade and a bathroom! I parked and settled in and discovered one little problem. You couldn’t leave your feet on the ground! The insane heat and today’s rain or some such condition has the local ant population (large nasty-looking black ants) in a permanent uproar, swarming everywhere. You would be covered in them if you sat with you feet on the ground for any length of time. Feet up on the picnic table was the only way to work it, and that wasn’t that comfortable for long amounts of time.
I hurriedly ate another quarter of my giant sandwich then headed out for an exploration of my neighborhood. The trail behind the picnic area petered out quickly, but there was a nice set of stairs to the top of the dam for the little lake – Dead Indian Reservoir is it’s too-evocative name.
It was very pretty up there. Sunset over the lake, and a panoramic view of my camping area and the Grasslands. Down at the boat launch there was a rickety little platform extending a few feet into the lake. I did my tai chi form out there, surrounded by the reflected reds and oranges of sunset. And I did NOT lose my flashlight (see two mornings from now)