A cold snap in Oklahoma changes my thinking

Monday (Nov 12)

It rained pretty hard last night, and it’s quite cold and blustery this morning.

I have good phone reception here and the weather apps are showing bad news for the next few days. My destination tonight is the Salt Plains area where 2-3″ of snow are forecast – highs in the low 30’s, lows in the teens. Yuck. Time to start researching motels out that way. I find a likely one in the town of Wagoner. I am relieved that I’ll be indoors tonight. Life is better whan I have enough phone reception to plan my day.

The conveniently named Fort Smith Coffee Co is where I want to drink my coffee this morning. It’s pretty much a straight shot across the breadth of Fort Smith on Rogers Avenue, but I’m a tourist, and I want to see the sights!

I therefore take Route 59 the wrong direction so I can take the bridge across the Arkansas River and check out the dam and locks going north. I follow 59 a few pleasant miles with the levee on my left, past the I-84 bridge to take the old bridge, cross back and start heading the right direction Business US 71 to my destination.

The coffee shop is on its own little plot at a major intersection with fences all around. I arrived at what must be Coffee Rush Hour around here, because every spot on all three sides was taken. I had to be creative in my parking.

There must be a school somewhere around here [University of Arkansas Fort Smith of course!], and they must be on a weird schedule, because the crowd here was kids at their laptops and on their phones and talking to each other trying to get their schedules straight. Ah college….

I retrace my path on Business 71 north back across the bridge with the idea of heading north to Prairie Grove battlefield, a place I enjoyed sixteen years ago. An hour plus later I get to a T intersection where the battlefield is seven miles east, but instead of turning that way … I  head west! It’s already 3-ish, and my motel is over an hour away, so I will get there around sunset if I go straight there. I sleep too late to be good at time allocation under daylight savings time.

I am following Oklahoma 51 across the state, and it takes me straight through the town of Tahlequah. Two years ago I was passing through this part of Oklahoma in the other direction, and I had an awful meal at an awful place in US 62 at the south edge of town. So I thought poorly of the place coming in, but the actual downtown is pretty cool. I drive to a restaurant downtown called The Branch. Since I have given up on camping, I might as well eat a nice meal somewhere if I can find one. I did not find it here. The restaurant was closed, but Tahlequah Creek was next door, and it was quite beautiful and interesting looking. The nice-looking building up the hill from the creek turned out to be the headquarters of the Cherokee Nation!

Eating in a restaurant in Tahlequah failed, but it was all for the good! I pressed on to my date with the Sleepy Time Motel in Wagoner. A few miles outside of Wagoner I crossed Fort Gibson Lake, and drove right past the Army Corps campground where I was going to stay before the bottom dropped out of the weather. It looked incredibly cold and bleak, and made me really happy to be staying inside tonight.

The Sleepy Time Motel turns put to be pretty awesome, the best value of all the inns I stayed on this trip. It takes me back to the ole travellin’ days with my Mom in the ole Chevrolet Impala, when every night we would park outside the door of our room in a little single-story motel on the side of the road.

As noted above, I have not eaten. A quick Yelp search shows that the bland-looking chicken place on the other side of the parking lot is as good as it’s gonna get in Wagoner. So I bundle up and trudge across the parking lot. I got the Monday night special – meatloaf with mashed potatoes and stewed tomatoes – and trudged back. I ate it on my own bed watching the Niners squander away a Monday Night Football game, and it was really quite good!

Temperature right now: 29°, 15 mph wind, “feels like 17°”.  Two weeks later, I happened to look at the Wagoner weather – high 50’s in the daytime, mid 30’s at night. Wagoner just happened to be the place where I started a string of bad weather luck.

Tuesday

Fucking cold all day. Highest temp I saw on my van dashboard was 34°. I’m gonna motel it again tonight.

Wagoner’s coffee place, the Koffee Kan, was way better than that name. Along with my coffee and cookie I got a Monte Cristo sandwich, which I have seen on menus, but can’t recall ever having. It hit my stomach about the same place breakfast would, which was a good thing!

Then drive all day. It is too fucking cold to enjoy outdoors that much, so I might as well stay in my comfy bus driver’s seat in my warm van and put some miles away. I am aiming for the Salt Plains. On a warmer day I would stay at the state park there, but that ain’t happening today.

I get there with a few minutes of daylight left and decide to see what I can at the Salt Plains Wildlife Refuge. It was super cool! The rangers told me it’s Sandhill Crane season, and that I should check out the viewing blind a short walk off the auto tour.

It was spectacular! Maybe the single coolest, most memorable thing I’ve seen on this trip. It started with sporadic groups of 10-20 birds, They are cool looking even when flying in their V formations, with their long necks and long legs, quite a different silhouette from geese. But it’s when they wheel in for a landing that they are amazing. They stick out their legs and back up air with their wings, just like the Flying Crane martial arts pose! As I was leaving the real onslaught happened.

Ever larger flocks had been coming in from the north, but then a whole convoy came in from the east, meaning directly overhead! It looked like those images of the airplanes on D-Day. Hundreds of these very large birds, V after V all whooping and all pulling in for a landing on the lake. Unforgettable.

The thing that made me excited about staying at this motel, paying the $80 was the cool looking steakhouse in the pictures on the website. I get there and it’s closed on Tuesday! But she recommended a place about 1/2 mile away owned by their previous cook called Face Stuffers (where DO they get these names?). It was an unlikely looking place, I don’t think I would’ve stopped if it weren’t recommended, but it was very good, probably a better deal than the steakhouse in that it’s cheaper with the same meat cooked the same way.

The Cherokee Motel cost $30 more, and at that still wasn’t as awesomely perfect as last night’s Sleepy Time Inn, but it was still pretty fun. Another Warriors game on the TV helped.

Wednesday

One feature of motels is that you are in the world doing stuff shortly after 11 AM, because that’s when you have to leave the room. As it happened there were Warriors games on the last two nights, so I was able to watch them (legally!) on my laptop with my DISH subscription.

Back to Face Stuffers for breakfast, still real good. I am going to spend most of the day enjoying Salt Plains. I do a complete counter-clockwise loop around the lake and the parks and the actual salt plains and the wildlife refuge. I read my blog from last time, there is an auxiliary air force base across the road. It’s still there, but no loud jets today.

The state park has cabins! If I had it to do over that would have been a way better place to spend the night than the Cherokee Inn. I have to loosen up my thinking a bit. Ordinarily I wouldn’t think of the cabins, but if I’m staying in a motel anyway …

The park had a nice primitive camping area next to the dam, and a full service campground campground across the river and downstream a bit. They both looked great, and if yesterday’s weather was today’s weather I would stayed at one.

Pass through Cherokee one more time, then drive! Unremarkable “Kansas south” kind of terrain. There is nothing much out here in the way of camping or services of any kind, but there is a little municipal campground called Doby Springs that I am heading for

Turn off the highway at the sign for Doby Springs Golf Course. That is the last helpful sign you will see. Maps tells me to take a left then another left to curl around the course to a tee intersection where I soon determined that the clubhouse is to the left and the park/camping area is to the right. I did a drive by on the clubhouse but it was deserted. No one to pay, so back to the park to settle in for the night.

It’s a very pretty place. The leaves have all dropped here, and those huge bare-limbed black oaks silhouetted agains the bleak winter sky is a favorite image of mine. There is a little pond, with beautiful reflections and a nice red sunset, so my half hour of daylight in the little park was great. I blogged at the picnic table for as long as I could, but when the sun went down it got really cold really quickly.

Thursday

It got down into the 20’s last night and I burned my propane to near empty stay warm, but it was comfortable inside. The van warms quickly on a sunny day. What freaked me into reverting to #motellife two nights ago wasn’t really the cold. It was the rain and wind and overcast. My cold weather camping model depends on there being morning sun to pour in and raise the interior temp 10-15° while I get my AM beauty rest. But if it’s 31° and cloudy at 9 am, my heater will still be pounding away just to stay at 55°. Anyway, I have enough warm covers to keep me cozy, but my fingers get too cold to type … it just can’t be helped.

On the last trip I spent the night in Guymon and enjoyed liked a little coffee place there. So I am resolved to go there today … the only problem is that it’s 98 miles away! Out here on the endless prairie you get used to big distances, but however you rationalize it, that means morning coffee will be an hour-forty away. I was a low blood sugar mess by the time I got there, I really was. Shoulda ate a candy bar or something. When I got to the side street they are on the first building was deserted. I had a brief “of f–k, I drove 100 miles for a place that’s gone”. But there it was on the other side of the Jack in the Box, same as two years ago – woo!

Still very good. They have a $8 lox and bagel plate that is quite the bargain.

As mentioned above, I need to get propane today. Goggle results for “propane” really aren’t that helpful. Most of the alleged propane dealers are selling those home canisters you hook up to your deluxe BBQ, not the “hook up the nozzle and fill the tank” propane that I need. So I failed on the two propanes place I checked out in Guymon.

The last town I will see today is Boise City, so that’s where propane has gotta happen. Google said there’s a U-Haul there, and U-Hauls always (hah!) sell propane. When I navigated a block off the impressive main square of BC, the U-Haul turned out to be complete disreputable and besides they were closed.

Uh oh… Went to the only grocery store looking for dinner, and the friendly Indian kids doing the bagging sent me back to the eastern end of town, over the bridge and to the right, to the Coop. Totally not on google. When all your devices and connectivity let you down, just popping into a store and asking somebody old school-style can still work! Thanks kids!

Stopped at the DQ as I drove past again and got a salad for tonight. I liked the kid there also. I think getting propane put me in a good mood! The last twenty miles from Boise City to Felt were a straight shot southwest, which this time of year is straight into the setting sun, There was a surreal, strange haze that puzzled me. It turned out to be fertilizer.

This is a really simple place, just pick your spot in the parking lot and chill. There’s a couple of picnic tables and a pit toilet. As soon as I open the door I was hit with the strong smell of cow poop. Today was fertilizer day in this neighborhood … great. As mentioned above, a half hour later I couldn’t even smell it!

This was a very enjoyable place to spend the evening.