Category: Touring

Last night I woke to noise outside the camper. It sounded like the cooler lid opening and closing. When we checked in, Nancy was told that there are determined raccoons in this park. We never leave food or trash lying around our sites. The cooler had one bottle of beer and a sealed new container of milk sitting in the ice water. Our small refrigerator didn’t have room for these two items.  I shone a flashlight out the window, but the cooler being tight against the camper was out of eyesight. The rattling continued. I opened the door to see a large, bigger than Moe, raccoon at the cooler. I chased it away, but it stayed within sight of me. Nancy is outside now. Moe is inside, hoping for his chance to battle with the intruder. We open the cooler to discover that the top plastic cap has been ripped off, and milk has colored the water white. Nancy goes back in to attempt quieting Moe. I dump the cooler, and Nancy empties what is left of the milk down the drain.

We go back to sleep until the dish drainer on the picnic table gets knocked to the ground. The menace runs off into the woods.

Morning comes. We dress and go outside to pick up the dishes and cook eggs and toast. After a slightly rushed coffee, we pack up to leave. Nancy cleans the dirty footprints out of the cooler.

The route to Colorado and the next campground is easy: one road north, one road west. At this junction, we turn east toward Dodge City to view the Santa Fe Trail wagon ruts. The sun is high in the sky, so it was difficult to see them, but we could. Unfortunately, in the photo, the ruts do not show as clearly as seen by eye.

Driving back to the route we see a Sonic. We stop for lunch. Then another stop in Lamar for ice and groceries.

We make it to the Hasty State Park on John Martin Lake. Camp is set, and we relax in the shade.

We are in Mountain Time. It is eight o’clock. Nancy is taking Moe for his evening walk while I finish this blog.

The morning is cool with a breeze. Nancy makes pancakes for our breakfast; we have maple syrup from our hometown. The treat from Ashfield is a gift from Ted Murray.

We drive to the City of Meade to see what is there. Driving into the center of the city, Nancy turns right, and we see a road sign for the Dalton Gang Hideout. We follow the sign and reach a small house; we are at the museum. An elderly white-haired man with sparse, thread-like hair meets us at the entrance. We got a bit of local history, then went inside and paid the fee, seven dollars each. Moe is free to enter with us.

More history is given; this hints at what we will see in the house. We begin at the barn, the museum office, and gift shop. Into the tunnel we go. This was an underground escape from the house.

We come to a stairway and climb to the house. The only two rooms are small.

Upstairs on the second floor.

We head back to the barn through the tunnel and climb to the second floor. Many more artifacts are displayed here.

The tour is finished; we stop to talk once more to the man caretaking this museum. He begins a history lesson of the city and area of Kansas when this was a stop on the cattle trail from Texas in the late 1800s. We learn about the cowboys and the “Women of negotiable affections”.

Upon leaving, he suggests Bob’s Burgers for lunch. This place is not the greasy spoon Sunday night cartoon. The food is good; we order takeout and drive a block to a wonderful shaded City Park. We picnic with Moe and head out of the city.

It is a thirteen-mile straight road back to the campground.

We learned a lot and enjoyed the adventure.

The wind blew last night. I felt it through the camper. This morning, I see streaks of water on the window. I also see drops rippling the newly formed puddles in the campsite. Once outside, I notice both chock blocks six feet from their wheels. The rain is over. I catch a glimpse of a clear sky before the sun peeks over the tree tops.

We gave up the last two nights here and booked two nights in Kansas. Last night, we packed up the screen tent. It is dry in the car. We drive into Beaver for cooler ice and groceries.

The drive today will be short, thirty minutes by car. We say farewell to Oklahoma.

And, hello to Kansas. We stop at the State Line. Our feeble attempt at touristy activity.

We decide to drive into the Meade Wildlife Management Area on the way to the campground.

Now at the campground, we stop at the office to check in. We find out that the hiking trails are closed. Multiple lightning strikes three weeks ago burned portions of the State Park.

The camper is hooked up to water and electric. It is hot. We are in the sun, so we walk around the lakeshore and come back to our site hungry. We find shade and nibble on snacks.

The biting flies, small to large, are vicious and dive bomb through clouds of repellent spray to any bare skin with Kamikaze determination and precision.

Another day ends.

From dark to light, from sleep to awake. This is the only change so far. Still hot, still windy; this has not changed in over a week. Back in April when I thought I would be riding through Oklahoma, Nancy booked campgrounds where it would be convenient for both my riding miles and rest days. So we are here for four nights.

Oklahoma has interstate highways or busy paved back roads with no shoulder. I’ll rephrase, on the few paved roads that have a shoulder, the state decided that filling up to two-foot shoulders with rumble strips is a great idea. On the roads that have no rumble strips, the fog line is right on the edge of the roads, and in some places, the white line is half on the pavement with the other half painted on the dirt.

The Golden Gravel Trail is on gravel roads that parallel the Interstates or paved back roads somewhere off in the distance. East or West, North to South, the grid is the same. I call them gravel roads loosely; in Oklahoma, soil is red clay. So any rain, even a fraction of an inch, the water sits on the clay in the form of pottery clay. The bike tires sink in, the clay sticks to the tires and everything it comes in contact with. And in the spots where you don’t sink in, the surface is greasy. So, since the incident with my bike getting to Copan, OK., I have been avoiding the red clay roads.

A long story short, this is why I am camping in places for multiple days. Nancy booked sites that would be in sync with my schedule. This campground is where I get shuttled to John Martin Reservoir State Park in Colorado. This is the first campground on the route where she could camp with services. And, for me, there is a stretch of one hundred sixty miles with no place to resupply, and the two BLM campsites have no water. My route maps show only three stops to get water, and they are from various water troughs for cattle.

I am at an age and place in life where I do not want this kind of suffering.  During our time in Oklahoma, we decided to alter portions of the route to include visiting more places in Utah.

This morning, Nancy booked a campground across the border in Kansas for tomorrow and the next day. It will shorten the drive to Colorado and allow seeing new sights along the way.

We will go into Beaver tonight for dinner at the BS Bar and Grill, which is located right across the street from Beaver Liquor. Yes, you read this correctly. The Bar and Grill comes highly recommended by the locals.

Beaver Liquor is uncertain.

The BS Bar and Grill, we get there around 4 p.m. The only other people there are one family. We sit down and the waitress takes our order, fairly simple: one burger, one Goucho (which is basically a steak sandwich), and two margaritas. The drinks come and we are told our dinners will be ready in a few minutes. The waitress comes back thirty minutes later and tells us it will be a minute before the meal comes. I order another drink. We’ve been sitting here over an hour now and the waitress comes over and asks if we’ve ordered yet.

Without all the details, we are pissed when she tells us our order must have been given to a takeout order. Words are exchanged. The owner comes to our table and offers to let us take our meal back to the campsite; poor Moe is waiting for us to come back. The owner apologizes and tells us the meal and drinks are on the house. I pointed to my margarita and said this is coming with me. She put it into a plastic glass and handed it to me at the back of the building. All of this for a so-so meal.

We had a nice stay at Alabaster Caverns. The entire time here, there were no others camping at this park. There were, however, multiple people coming here for the cavern tours. We will leave this morning to our next campground in the Oklahoma Panhandle. After breakfast, we load the car and camper; we are now ready to leave. But first, we drive down into the canyon to see the tent-only sites.

Back on top, Nancy drives to the lookout parking area, surprising me with the view stretching the length of the canyon. She was told that it is believed that the canyon was created after a cavern collapsed millions of years ago.

Now the camper is hitched to the car, and we are on the road. We stop at a small city, Buffalo, OK, to fill the car with gas and ourselves with Subway grinders. I topped off the sandwich with a pint of Hagen-Daz.

“On the road again to a place we have never been”. The Panhandle is much like Texas, or so my memory has convinced me.

We arrive at the campground around 3:30 p.m. and set up camp.

We then ride into the City of Beaver for ice, groceries, and something at the hardware store to splint a cross strut on the screen tent. We also find out that there is a nice steak and burger restaurant that has killer margaritas. I think tomorrow evening we will see for ourselves!

Hot and windy all night. I opened the door this morning to find branches on the ground next to and in our site. Then oatmeal and coffee before the office opened. Just before 9 am a car drives in and then the neon “open” sign lights up. Nancy and Moe walk over to purchase tickets for the Cavern tour. We will leave for the 10 a.m. tour.

We ride in the van with two other women to the entrance. It is already hot, so the first step into the cavern is refreshing.

The tour is over. We walk over to the camper where Moe has his face pressed against the window. His mouth is flapping, and as we get closer, we hear his bark-bark-barking through the glass window. We open the door, and he comes outside to us with the same frantic speed of someone freed from a stuck elevator.

We leash him, and he joins us on a hike. The trail led us to the canyon ridge. Moe races and stretches his leash to the edge. Nancy is reeling him back like she just hooks a thirteen-pound fish.

The trail drops us to a stream at the bottom before we climb the rocks and slippery slope back to the top.

We make it back without Moe going over any ledges. Without either of us slipping or breaking bones. It is again hot enough to just sit in the shade and wait for the day to cool. It is cooling at about the speed of watching grass grow.

This morning I stepped out of the hammock to get a photo of the night sky. Before I could grab the hammock, it puffed like a sail. The forty-mile-per-hour wind blew my pillow up into the air. It sailed away. I spent the next thirty minutes looking in the dark for a black pillow. I found it resting on the ground four campsites away.

We stopped in Alva at the Aspen Laundromat. We had two bags of clothes and sheets to wash. It might be another week before we get the chance again.

An hour later, the clothes are washed and dried. While in town, we stop at Sonic for burgers and fries with milkshakes. We are now back on the road, rolling over hills through grazing land. Cattle are grazing or resting under scattered shade trees.

The land is flat and open, and the horizon surrounds us.

We make it to Alabaster Caverns and set up camp. It is hot, and the wind is relentless.

We ate a late lunch in Alva before continuing to the campground, and it’s now too hot to want food. After sitting in the shade waiting for the sun to settle, we take a short walk around the campground.

We are about seventy-five miles from the Oklahoma Panhandle, and the climate and scenery are beginning to look more arid.

Tomorrow we begin exploring this park.

A rant about idiots and stupidity in the world. Last night as the sun was setting and I was getting ready to head over to the hammock, I watched a big-ass RV try backing up to turn around. It missed the parking spot of a site across from us and backed into a tree. Hold on, it gets better. After scraping the roof, the RV went four sites past us, and the driver was too inept to back into the site, so the driver turned onto the grass area across from the site, bouncing the front wheels into the ditch and proceeded to drive until the rear wheels got stuck in the ditch. The back of the RV was resting on the ground. It is stuck! The driver keeps trying to rock back and forth, scrape-scrape, scrape-scrape. A crowd gathers, and someone with a large one-ton truck drives on the road to get ahead and hook to the RV. A few tries later, the RV is unstuck and soon in the campsite. This morning I was walking from the bath/shower building and saw this same RV drive to the dumpster at the corner of the loop. Trash is thrown into it, and the RV begins to leave. We are now at the finale! The driver pulls away and turns the corner, scraping the dumpster with the entire side of the RV with enough force to move the dumpster!

It is 7 a.m. and it is already unbearably hot. We hunt for shade. Well, Nancy is in the camper with AC blasting, eating cold cereal. I am outside at the picnic table getting ready to cook my eggs and toast breakfast. The wind is blowing, knocking over chairs and dishes off the table. The stove is lit, the bread is toasting, and I’m cooking over a horizontal flame. It has been like this for days.

Breakfast is eaten, coffee is brewing. I’m racing around in a sweat, grabbing dish towels and plates escaping across the campsite grass. Things have been gathered and stored away. I am sipping coffee.

Nancy comes outside and is ready to explore the Salt Plains Bird Sanctuary. With things secured from the blasting wind, we drive off to the Visitor Center to start the hike.

Back at the car, we begin driving the auto road through the sanctuary.

And then we stop at the Salt Flats.

I want ice cream and beer. Nancy wants ice cream but no beer. We also pick up more juice, sodas, and a bag of ice for the cooler.

We get back to the campsite mid-afternoon and put the drinks into the cooler with the ice.

As I write this from inside with the AC blasting, the inferno wind is slamming and rocking the camper. I’m waiting for the sun to give up and go away for the day so I can enjoy a cold beer on the bluff watching the birds fish for their dinner.

Flocks of blue heron and white pelican set upon the river beside me. I watch from the hammock. It is still dark with a spot of dim light off in the distance. The wind is blowing cool air, and I sway relaxed and rested.

That dim light brightens to a warm glow, announcing the arrival of the sun. Now above the horizon, the air climbs from cool to scorching almost instantly.

I step onto the ground and walk to the camper. Nancy and Moe are beginning their day. Nancy sits in the shade, enjoying cold cereal. I, standing in the sun, begin the task of cooking eggs and toast. The wind is so strong that it blows the heat away from the skillet. Cooking is slow, nearly impossible.

Breakfast is over. We sit in the shade. The sun rises, the shade moves. We move back into the shade. This repetition seems endless. I suggest we hike the Tonkawa Trail, a disappointing effort.

2 p.m. 97° feels like 110°.

We have cold pulled pork and macaroni salad for a late dinner. It is too hot to want to eat, but the cold food is good. It is 7:30 p.m. and the hazy, hot sun is beginning to sink in the sky.

When the heat drops a bit more, I’ll shower and settle in for the night.

Pancakes for breakfast! Coffee at a slow pace, then packing up to move to Salt Plains State Park. The gravel roads are still wet clay; the only other road to ride west is a highway. We had decided that I would ride with Nancy to the campground. A three-hour drive in the car, a three-day slog on bicycle.

This part of Oklahoma is transforming into large open space with cultivated fields. No photos from the car window.

We arrive at the State Park and back into site #18, set up, and walk to the beach. We are the only one here. Then Nancy checked the campground map. WE ARE IN THE WRONG LOOP!

We drive over to the other loop and find the other site, the correct site, RR 018. D’oh! We go back and hitch up the camper and haul it to the correct site.

This is a much better site. We are on the riverbank; it is much cooler with the wind off the water, and there are two trees by the river space perfectly for the hammock.

I will sleep here tonight.