OOOOk-lahoma!!!

Am I the only one who likes to crank up and sing along to old Rodgers & Hammerstein show tunes when crossing the Great Plains? (perhaps this explains why no brave man has settled into my RV's co-pilot seat!)

But who could resist belting out a few bars of "Oooook-la-homa" when seeing such bright yellow fields of canola (after so many months of just looking at desert brown)?

My April journey from the southwest to Chicago took me across the Sooner state on a couple of warm and sunny days-- carefully planned to avoid their notorious springtime thunderstorms and tornadoes.  On the agenda: a visit to a National Wildlife Refuge and a re-visit to a town closely tied to my family history.

P = Pulled In and Parked

After leaving the Checotah Flying J, we had a warmer sunnier driving day through northeast Oklahoma and southwestern Missouri.  Incredibly, after taking over 7,000 photos this winter, I took zero on this day!  Missed a few really good shots too, like the full-sized bald eagle perched atop a small, wobbly tree right alongside the highway near Muskogee.  So strange to see one so close to the highway, on a much smaller tree than you usually see them in!

A few hours later, I was cruising along northeast of Tulsa and happened to look over at cattle grazing in a field.  There was something a bit odd within the herd, though, and as I got closer, I recognized them as three full-sized camels!  They were just grazing right alongside their bovine brothers as if it was just a perfectly normal thing to do!

But beyond those two momentary oddities, the day’s drive was fairly ho-hum.  The Interstate routes through Missouri and Illinois are exceedingly familiar, and as a result, the vistas just don’t inspire me the way other places do!

We had an uneventful, quiet night at the Wal-Mart parking lot near Ft. Leonard Wood, MO and continued on to Chicago the next day.  The only photos I took were out of sheer boredom in St. Louis as I sat in a long, slow-moving backup of trucks waiting to get onto the bridge across the Mississippi river!

I arrived back to my house after dark, pulled the Winnie (with Tracker still attached) right into the center of the driveway and parked.  After over 3 months and over 5,000 miles, we were back to our “non-mobile” home again.

We will stay parked here for the next few months as I work to get the house listed and sold this summer.  After that, the world is our oyster!

 

 

O = Oklahoma Old Times

High winds and  storms were moving into Texas, and Millie and I had a decision to make:  stay perched on the hilltop in Llano, or quickly head north to outrun the front.  I noticed that the strong winds would be coming from the South, and that made the decision much easier —Perfect!  They’ll help blow us north! 

I found a good route that would keep us out of the crosswinds, and soon Millie and I were on our way to Oklahoma.

The skies got dramatically darker as we neared Glen Rose, TX, so I pulled over to check the real-time radar maps on my Weather Channel app   It seems the winds were doing an excellent job of pushing those storms into Dallas and keeping them out of our intended route through downtown Fort Worth!

Sure enough, when we got to Fort Worth, the black clouds were nowhere to be found.  Now all we had to do was slip the Winnie beneath the big spaghetti pile of highway ramps!

 

I pulled into the Ardmore, Oklahoma Flying J with a few minutes of daylight to spare and snagged the last open RV parking spot for the night (and what a bonus, it was level too!).

My cousin Linda and I had made plans months ago to see each other on my drive back to Chicago from Mexico and were really looking forward to seeing each other again after 15 years.  The next morning, I rolled the Winnie up to her house and Millie got to meet her three little doggie cousins while Linda and I started catching up.

Millie made herself right at home in fairly short order-- doing a quick “Hoovering” of the little dogs’ bowls to clean up their leftover food and water, grabbing a few larger toys out of their toy box to play with, and like any certifiably rude and obnoxious houseguest, Millie then jumped up on their living room sofa to stretch out for a nice nap!  Sheesh!

Thankfully, the little dogs were gracious hosts (“Nuestra casa de perros,  es su casa de perros!”), and in the meantime, Linda and I went out to lunch and then to look at nearby camping options for my rolling home for the night.

We found some absolutely fabulous campgrounds at Lake Murray State Park, just a few miles from my cousin’s house, and I rolled into this nice pull-thru site with a good view of the lake about an hour later.

Linda invited Millie and I back to her house for dinner and we got to meet her partner, Jim, who was now home from work.  He and Millie became fast friends, and by the end of the evening, I was having a very hard time extricating Millie.from the luxurious splendors of her newfound Oklahoma home!  All truth be told, I was quite enjoying those splendors too! 

It was a great dinner and fun evening retelling old funny stories of our dearly departed relatives.  Our grandfather was an executive for the Packard Motor Company back in the day and always had a passion for big, fast cars—even well into his 90’s when he would insist on driving us kids and our parents out to dinner whenever we’d visit.  This meant driving down the middle of a 2-lane country road to his favorite steak house…at no less than 90 miles an hour!   On multiple occasions he would forget to open the garage door before putting his boat-sized 1970s car into reverse…always mystified how someone could have come along and pulled the door down right into his path!  Our grandfather was quite a colorful character, for sure!

His passion for the automotive industry carried over to his children (my dad and Linda’s mom), who had an epiphany in the mid-late 1970s to pool their life savings’ and buy two used car lots in Ardmore.  I was thrilled at the time, as I had just gotten my driver’s license and looked forward to spending the summer with my dad and brother in Ardmore and getting to drive all sorts of fast and fun cars!

The next morning, I took a quick tour around town to see some of these old haunts before leaving Ardmore:

Glen Rabe bought the car dealership from my dad and aunt, and has now successfully run it from that location for over 30 years (apparently proving that the location was just fine; it was the management that needed fixing)!.

Down the street, the Sonic Drive-In continues to do a booming business.  This was the social epicenter of town for High School teens with fast cars in the 1970s, and apparently, it continues that same role today!

Downtown Ardmore is still hopping like it used to.  I knew my dad’s old second car lot was around here somewhere…

and then I saw it!  What is now the Jimmy J’s Dairy Freeze, was the former “Kar Korner”—a once briefly-thriving Mecca of the southern Oklahoma pre-owned automotive world!

Even the old garage behind the the white “office” was still there—where my brother and I spent some happy summer weeks helping to wash and detail cars!   What a hoot!

After my brief trip down memory lane, it was time to get the Winnie rolling north again.  I decided to bypass the Oklahoma Turnpike (I-44) and take the leisurely route across eastern Oklahoma through McAlister and Muskogee.

We arrived to our overnight spot at the Checotah, OK Flying J just after a rainstorm and enjoyed seeing our first Spring daffodils while dodging the rain puddles.  Warmer weather can’t be too far behind now!

 

 

 

Mad Dash to Mexico

Even after preparing for this Mexico trip for nearly six months, I still found myself in a mad scramble to get the house buttoned up, rig packed, and get on the road.  Adding to the chaos, we managed to squeeze a house closing in there too (my stepsister, Holley, and her husband bought my mom’s house a couple days before I left).

Since the family had so much activity going on, we decided to move up our Thanksgiving/Christmas celebration to the weekend before Thanksgiving and had a wonderful evening together.  With that finished, it was now time to focus on the getting all the piles staged in my living and dining rooms moved out into the RV.  A bitter cold front had also just arrived further motivating me to hurry up and get out of town!

On Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, Millie and I were finally on our way.  I was plenty nervous about this new rig (especially with visions of what surely were hundreds of pounds of excess cargo I had shoved into every nook and cranny!).  But the “T1Nnie Winnie” performed like a champ and had no problems at all.

I probably should have done a test hook-up of the new rig to the Tracker earlier, but had never gotten around to it.  So, on the day before Thanksgiving, when I finally hooked up the Tracker to the View, I now realized that this new View’s rear hitch was a couple inches lower than my previous View (so, now making my 6” drop hitch receiver a bit low and making the tow bar un-level).   Remembering that eTrailer.com was in the St. Louis area, and I could easily route that way on my trip to the Southwest, I called them to see about picking up a new drop hitch later that day.

Of course, I never manage to estimate my departure times correctly when leaving on a big trip, and this time was no different.  I now would not arrive to eTrailer until well past their closing time.  But, no worries!  A wonderful customer service girl named Rose, found a good hiding spot for my box outside, gave me the access code to open up their driveway security gate, and even gave me her home phone number to call that night if I had any problems.  Wow!  All that on the day before a holiday!  What a great group of folks (with great products and prices) at eTrailer.com !!!

Millie and I made our way across Missouri and Kansas as fast as we could, driving about 500 miles a day, and spending our nights at Flying J truck stops.  I had planned to stay overnight at a Wal-Mart in Kansas on Thanksgiving night, but then remembered that it would be Black Friday eve and that parking lot would be jammed with shoppers!  So, we found this nice Flying J in Emporia, KS to bed down for the night.  Millie enjoyed meeting her equine “neyhhh-bors"!



We routed through Kansas for two reasons—the diagonal route would be the shortest distance to Arizona from Chicago, but more importantly, we had a very special delivery to make at the family gravesites in Augusta, Kansas.  When we had scattered my mom’s ashes this past summer in Colorado, I had held back one small container to scatter at her parents graves.

My mom (as well as her mom) were consummate shoppers and considered Black Friday the highlight of their shopping year.  So, no better a day to reunite these 2 shop-a-holics!



We then continued our long day’s drive across Kansas.  It remained clear and sunny, but turned quite windy by afternoon.  No worries, though!  I just pulled into a nice city park in western Kansas and took a quick nap on our new RV’s nice permanent rear bed.  The sun shining through the windows made it a perfect warm and cozy mid-afternoon retreat!

Pushing on, we continued towards Liberal, Kansas and through the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas.  The drive was rather dull and uneventful, but I can report that I observed no liberals in Liberal, KS.  Nor did I see any hookers at the Hooker Inn in Hooker, Oklahoma!!!  But I did manage to snap a few pics of our new View’s shadow to break up the monotony!



By the time I reached the Texas panhandle, it was now after dark and the 2-lane Highway 54 felt a bit treacherous at Texas’ legal 75 mph speed limit.  I was glad to finally cross into New Mexico to return to a slower, safer speeds and spent the night at yet another Flying J in Tucumcari.

On Saturday, I hit the road early to meet up with fellow View-owner, Evelyn, at a casino on the outskirts of Albuquerque where she’d spent the night.  We caravanned along I-40 to make our way west to Arizona by nightfall.  Other than some dense fog and white-knuckle driving around Flagstaff, we finally arrived to one of my favorite BLM boondocking locations just outside of Cottonwood, AZ just after dark.   We awoke to this serene sunrise vista on Sunday morning:



Wishing we had more time to spend in Cottonwood, we regretfully had to leave on Sunday to continue pushing on to Yuma (as I had a dental appointment the next day). We decided to take the more-direct scenic route through Prescott and stopped for lunch in the little town of Yarnell, AZ (where the 19 firefighters lost their lives battling a wildfire last summer).  A touching memorial has been erected right next to the town’s restaurant.



Also, while in Yarnell, we happened to see another View (this one from Missouri), but we were never able to locate it’s drivers!



We finally arrived to Yuma by mid-afternoon and were greeted by warm, sunny temps in the mid-70’s.  We settled on a nice gravel plateau about a mile north of the Mexican border to boondock for the week with my friend, KamperBob, while getting our dental work done in Algodones, Mexico.  

Hopefully, all of my future cross-country drives will be at a much more leisurely pace!

Escaping Winter Once More!

So, as you might guess from the title, the work gig in Tucson got finalized and I hastily packed and readied the View for Season 2 of snowbirding in the Southwest.  I was able to make a quick appointment at the commercial truck tire shop to get my new Bilstein shocks installed, and decided to go ahead and get a set of new tires as well.  The View only had 32,000 miles, but the tread on the OEM Continental tires was looking so bald, I didn’t relish the thought of winter driving on them! 

By the way, the Bilsteins are indeed an improvement!  They don’t completely eliminate the “rock and roll” (when going over curbs slowly for example), but they considerably reduce it without making the ride feel stiff or harsh.  So, a very worthwhile upgrade for about $200 installed.

Millie and I finally got packed up and on the road late Saturday afternoon and made it to our familiar, trusty Wal-Mart parking lot in Litchfield, IL for our first evening of free overnight parking.  We had spent New Year’s Eve here last year on our way down to the Southwest, and an even more bitterly cold sub-zero night here back in 2007 in the T@B.  This year, thankfully, our travel coincided with a brief stretch of unseasonably warm and dry weather with overnight lows only into the low 30’s.

We divided our time between Wal-Marts and Flying J truck stops.  Sure love free overnight parking after a long day of traveling!  Last year, I had just about abandoned Flying J when their prices seemed much higher than local stations, and they began charging for more RV services.  Well, this year, it seems like they’re trying very hard to get back in “good graces” with the RVing community.  I got an email last week saying they’ll now be giving 6 cents off per gallon for Good Sam members and, following the example Wal-Mart started last year with it’s Murphy Oil promo, Flying J is offering 10 cents off per gallon when using their new Flying J credit card.

We stayed at the Joplin, MO Flying J the next night and I was eager to drive thru town the next morning to see how the recovery was progressing from last Spring’s deadly tornado. 

Joplin is a decent-sized town, so by no means was it entirely wiped off the map (like the small town of Greensburg, KS had been a few years ago from its deadly tornado), but the Joplin tornado was certainly quite large and ripped a path over a mile wide and a few miles long of complete destruction--

Some businesses, like this American Mattress store, seemed completely untouched from the day the tornado struck--

Yet, many others, like this Pizza Hut, were well on their way to recovery.  The people of Joplin are moving forward.

After another Flying J night in western Oklahoma, we made our way across the Texas panhandle.  It always feels like my gateway to the Southwest when I start seeing those big skies and wide-open vistas--

and magical skies of New Mexico!

After a quiet night at a Walmart east of Albuquerque, we headed south to Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge near San Antonio, NM.  No truck stops or WalMarts there, but a nice couple of nights at the Bosque Birdwatchers RV Park, run by a fun-loving, free-spirit elderly lady named Jackie, and her middle-aged son.  (more Bosque photos in the next post!)

I spent most of the next day catching up on work, and then hit the road again for the final leg into Tucson.  We crossed the border into Arizona greeted by the most amazing sunset… Home, sweet home for the next 2 months!

Oklahoma Whale Watching

The Interstate between Oklahoma City and Tulsa is a toll Turnpike.  While fast and efficient, it’s also a pretty dull drive.   Since I wasn’t all that excited about returning to snowy, cold Chicago, I decided to take the slower scenic Route 66 road that parallels must of the Turnpike through northeast Oklahoma.

I saw some vintage Route 66 stuff, and plenty of small towns….

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But the one roadside attraction I was REALLY wanting to see was, perhaps, the most outrageous Route 66 attraction of them all…the Blue Whale in Catoosa, Oklahoma just northeast of Tulsa.

There are some great stories about how this little park was created, and later, how it was renovated and brought back to it’s original splendor.  The park is no longer operational, but still is freely open for tourists to stop and photograph.

 

After this final diversion, it was time to put the rubber to the road and head on home.  Our final night of this 6-week adventure was spent the same way it began….at a Wal-Mart parking lot.   But this time, surprisingly, there was one other camper in the lot, and it just happened to be one of our old trailers, a T@B!

What a great end to a great trip!   Can’t wait to snowbird again next year!