4/9/15 – Shamrock TX to Bartlesville OK

“OOOOH-KLAHOMA,  where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain ! ” There is a reason that those lines appear in the iconic song about this state.  The landscape may change from open range to hills, to grassland, the trees may be different as one heads east, but the wind is constant.  The only change, in my experience is whether it comes from the north or south.

Jay and I left Shamrock Texas early, enduring I–40 for a few miles until we came to Elk City, Oklahoma where Jay had heard there was a really good breakfast restaurant, at exit 41.  We made the tour through the entire town, trying to find this elusive egg-citing place, but to no avail. One path we tried ended up being an unmarked entrance back onto I-40, leading us to some unintended off-roading as we went down an embankment over to a side road to get back into town.  I’m happy to report that being harnessed to a sidecar has not completely erased the F650GS’s off-pavement cred.  Hungry and disappointed (more the former than the latter) we started up OK 34, a due north two-lane that would take us to Rt. 60 and, we hoped, food.

Once headed north, the strong cross-wind coming from that direction became a headwind.  While that’s not usually more than a nuisance on a solo bike, I discovered that on a sidecar, physics takes charge with some interesting results.  If I understand it correctly, air resistance increases with the square of the road speed, or some similar formula, the upshot of which is that the faster you go the harder the air coming at you pushes back.  Since the sidecar pushes air just like a small vehicle in its own right, though without any power of its own to oppose it, this means that a headwind tries to rotate the sidecar back behind the bike, to the right.  (Of course this happens when driving into still air, but not nearly so much….refer back to that exponential formula).  So I’m driving in a constant hard steer to the left, meaning that I’m essentially doing a one-handed pushup with my right arm and a pull-up with the left.  It’s been a long, long time since I’ve done either exercise until my triceps and biceps cramped, but I was doing that now.

We passed through several named “towns” on 34, but none had anything more than a drive through convenience store advertising cheap beer and a crossroad.  Not even a bar, the icon that usually defines a town out in the hinterlands, and certainly not a gas station, mailbox or post office. I suppose folks out here have to drive an hour or more for a sit-down meal or to mail a letter.

I was greatly relieved when the intersection with Rt. 60 appeared because it meant we could turn away from due north, and there was an actual town, Vici, Oklahoma, (population 699) with a restaurant and gas station.  The headwind had sucked the mileage right out of my rig and the fuel light was on.

At the restaurant, our waitress was a nice young woman in her teens who called the owner “mom” and served us, unasked, containers of peanut butter with our pancakes.  When I inquired whether this was a local custom, she gave me that sort of pained smile one would give the terminally dim who ask a question that just anyone should know the answer to.  Why would a person NOT have peanut butter with pancakes?   Later as we were preparing to leave, I saw her staring thoughtfully out the window at the motorcycles, with their not-from-here license plates, parked at the curb.

Rt. 60 is another old transcontinental highway, but without the legendary status of Rt. 66, even though for considerable portions, they are the same road.  What is now the “mother road” was intended in the original plans to have the Rt. 60 name, but a controversy among the states (including Kentucky) over the proposed route, ended up with 60 being the transcontinental route from the east coast and 66 starting in Chicago, though the two were linked  at times in the west.  Rt. 60 ran through my home town when I was a boy and runs through where I live now.  We could follow it all the way to the Bluegrass State from here in the windy state.

In Enid OK, we were greeted by the sight and sound of a fighter jet making a swooping turn right overhead, seeming too low for such urban settings.  Later we learned that this city houses an Air Force fighter wing and this must be a common event ’round these parts.  Coming into town, we spotted an information sign pointing us on to an “Arlo Guthrie Welcome Center”.  Despite our best efforts, though we followed several more signs directing us to it, this particular attraction never made an appearance.  Not sure why Arlo should have his own welcome center there, but if he does, it’s well hidden.

Pie time in the afternoon came as we neared Ponca City, OK, an old town named after a Native American tribe,  that once was on the main road, but now has been bypassed as Rt. 60 has been four-laned around it.  Several cafes were on the main street, all but one closed for the afternoon. Our default choice was inside an antique store, where the woman behind the counter was at first reluctant to serve the cheesecake she had just made, saying that it wouldn’t look right if cut while warm.  We assured her that we were substance-over-form type people and would cheerfully overlook any aesthetic problems and focus only on the taste and texture.  We pronounced her efforts completely successful.

Immediately after Ponca City, Rt. 60 returns to its two lane roots as it crosses the Osage Reservation.  We cruised on past the ornate casinos and continued east into Bartlesville where evening called our travels to a halt.  Bartlesville reminds me a bit of where I grew up, Ashland, KY, in that it is a small town, about 35,000 population, dominated by two large corporations (Phillips and Conoco…which once were one entity) with the large buildings and wide streets constructed back in the industrial heyday of these giants.  I recall being told, when I lived there many years ago, by an Ashland Oil executive that his corporation’s managers did not consider it a good thing to be promoted to the home office in small Ashland after they’d been running some subsidiary in a much larger city.  Eventually, of course, Ashland Oil moved its headquarters elsewhere.  Bartlesville did have, for our purposes, an inexpensive (read “cheap”) motel across the street from a restaurant and that was, industrial considerations aside, enough for us.