In all the cheap motels and fleabag places  where I’ve stayed on many, many trips here and abroad, I’ve never had a “security problem”….but at the somewhat upscale Comfort Inn, in Poplar Bluff Missouri, someone opened up the tonneau on the sidecar and rifled the inside,  leaving the cover open for us to find the next morning.  Nothing seems to have been taken, since I leave nothing of any value outside, but still it’s disturbing.  The bikes were parked under a light, across the lot in a direct line of sight from the motel office, but the intrusion occurred. Maybe I was right all these years to pick cheap places.  Perhaps thieves avoid them because they figure if I’m staying there, I haven’t got anything worth stealing !

Penny’s Diner in Dexter MO

Breakfast arrived  at Penny’s Diner in Dexter, MO,  one of those “dining car” places that seem to crop up occasionally.  While some are real railroad cars, turned to this use (we have found those in the northeast) these  like Penny’s are manufactured replicas, usually with a 60’s rock ‘n roll theme.  Often they do have great breakfast food (and good milkshakes, but I’m a bit past having those for breakfast now) and an atmosphere of nostalgia, however faux, that is comforting.  A waitress far too young to

Penny’s Diner in Dexter MO

remember any of the rock icons and other memorabilia on the walls took our order as early 60’s hits that she probably considered “retro” came over the speakers. We too are retro, for real, so we enjoyed the music.

It’s only a short jaunt on Rt 60  from Dexter to the Kentucky border, where the problem of getting across the river presents itself.  The “old” bridge has been closed for years, requiring that we get on I-57 for a bit and follow confusing directions, into Illinois,  to get across the river into Kentucky again.  It’s awkward, but it works.

There is a rest stop on the highway, near Paducah,  built into an impressive Civil War era mansion, “Whitehaven”.   One can stand on the porch of the old plantation house and see that there must have been fields all around, now converted to Interstate highway and its accompanying clutter.  One could see, back in the day, the old patriarch standing there with his family, waving his arm expansively into the distance and saying, ” Children, someday people from all over the country will come here into our house to pee”.

We picked Rt 62 for the return trip through Kentucky, a road both Jay and I are familiar with from previous journeys.  It winds along in a more or less direct line to Lexington and has enough curves to keep it interesting but not to work me and the rig too hard.  We made our last pie stop of the trip (pause for a small tear to make its way down into my beard…) near Dawson Springs at a roadside restaurant that just happened to specialize in made-on-the -premises coconut cream pie.  Sometimes the stars do align for good fortune.   From there it was a matter of getting home, since afternoon was fading and so were we.  Once upon a time, 12 hours in the saddle was the norm and daylight till dark riding was just what we did as a matter of course.  But those days are long behind me now and I was getting tired by the time we reached Elizabethtown.  We stayed on the Parkway, once something we wouldn’t have considered, all the way to Versailles.  Then just when Lexington was in sight, the Keeneland traffic had us at a halt.  Though the last race was at 5-something, the track attendees were still making their way out in droves at 7.  Jay peeled off at New Circle to head home and I proceeded on Rt. 60, out of a sense of closure, to Winchester.

Though I’d pushed it a bit harder on this last day, as the barn called,  the rig was still running well, as if this had all been routine.

When first I threw a leg over the F650GS in Enumclaw, Washington, March 26th, it had 29,220 miles on its digital odometer, and when I parked it in Winchester, Ky 17 days later  on April 11th, there were 33,161, for a total of 3,941 miles  Google maps says I could have made it from there to here  in 1 day, 11 hours and 2,431 miles.  What do they know about traveling ?

I cleared several items off the proverbial  bucket list on this trip,  doing the fly-buy-ride thing I’d  always wanted to do, riding the entire Pacific coastline from Oregon down to southern California, obtaining a sidecar rig, seeing Monterey Bay and Big Sur, staying at the Blue Swallow motel, and more I’m sure I’ll think of later.  It was a grand adventure, with a glitch or two here and there for seasoning, but no drama worthy of nail-biting nor any heroics required.  It won’t be made into a TV movie with Keneau Reeves playing me and a new waterboxer GS playing the rig.  But it was wonderful for me, at my age and I thank whatever deities and  lucky stars there may be that I could do it.

On Monday, one of the major reasons for the whole extravaganza was completed. I picked up grandson Ian at school with the rig.

Picked up Ian at school

Leaving Bartlesville at daylight, we continued east on Rt. 60 into a rapidly changing landscape.  Eastern Oklahoma gets less windy, the redbud trees start showing up in their pink blossoms and the roadside trees change to tall deciduous.  The road begins to wind a bit more, going through hills and around curves that hide the horizon we’d been seeing ahead of us for days.  We crossed Kentucky Creek, which caused me to think of how that name might have migrated out here, perhaps with a homesick traveler back in the pioneer days.

The constant wind has faded now, with the coming of the hills and trees, allowing me to easily hold a straight line again without effort.  I’m back to leaning over the “tipover lines” in the curves, sometimes hanging off the side of the bike, over the sidecar, on the right handers, probably amusing Jay behind me, to see such exaggerated gyrations producing slow progress.
We cross into Missouri and suddenly the trip feels less remote, more like we’re back in home country again. Rt. 60 loses some of its charm when it takes on four-lane pretensions for long stretches, but time is growing short so we endure these drones.

At Seymour MO, we find lunch at Uncle Rooster’s cafe where the waitress, who appears to be in her early 40’s, tells us that she has several grandchildren and another on the way.  I order a virtuous salad, but then am swayed by the coconut cream pie that Jay gets, such that I end up leaving most of the salad untouched to concentrate on the pie. One must have priorities.

We are, as Randy Scott used to say, “burning daylight, so the rest of the day recedes in the rear view mirror in a blur as we make our way into Poplar Bluff to call a halt.  There the only motels available are of the “modern” variety, without outside entrances to the rooms, requiring us to unload the bikes onto a cart and proceed up an elevator to our accommodations.  There is a fine Mexican restaurant nearby however, so we are satisfied.

“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.