Bluegrass Beemers

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.

Morning in Tucumcari NM, the light from the sun breaking over the far plains has that reddish-yellow tinge, spreading its color over the prairie grass and sage, bringing the heat that will again start the winds.  On advice from Kevin, I walk down to Kix on 66, the breakfast place in town.  It is in the former Denny’s, built here when 66 was still the main road and I-40 was a project in the works.  Now Denny’s is out on the interstate and Kix is an independent place with a can-do attitude, making the best breakfast for miles, many miles, around.  The perky waitress brings me a house specialty, a ginger spice latte’ (not my usual breakfast drink but she seemed so proud of it, I couldn’t refuse…and she was right) and my eggs & bacon which she says she cooked for me herself.  She’s good at her work.  There are the locals in here, the ones you find in every early morning breakfast place in the US, with the main difference being that many of these are wearing cowboy hats.  Mostly men, of course, it usually is at this hour, older men.

Back at the Blue Swallow, the rig is rolled out of the garage for the loading up and Sidecar Delay Factor strikes again.  A middle aged couple from Pennsylvania walks out of their room and begins quizzing me about the rig.  They are riders, back home, who have just purchased a trike for the wife after she had an unfortunate encounter with a guardrail on her two-wheel motorcycle.  They have an acquaintance, a lady from their town who also bought a rig from DMC, though one with a lot more bells and whistles than mine.  The husband offers that if I will take his place going to visit his kids in Phoenix, he will ride the rig back east for me.  I decline his offer.

Kevin has recommended a locksmith in Tucumcari to make spare keys for the 650.  The bike, a 2006, came with only one when I got it and I’ve been concerned about the prospect of losing it.  In more than 50 years of doing this riding thing, I’ve never lost a motorcycle key….but then, I’ve never had just one.  The locksmith, a pleasant fellow who tells me that he has often visited Kentucky when he lived on the east coast, makes the two keys from the blanks I provided and charges me just $2.00.  He won’t take more.

I take old 66 again for a while, but hit I-40 again to make up some time.

The Midpoint Café – Home of the Ugly Crust Pie

I have a mediation set on the 14th and can’t be late.  There is one detour I have to make, at Adrian, Texas, to stop at the Midpoint Cafe, the halfway mark on the Mother Road.  The specialty there is “ugly crust pie” which the menu tells me is better than it looks.  They are correct.  I eat two pieces, one apple and the other chocolate peanut butter.  That will do for lunch today.

Much of the rest of the day is a drone across the Texas panhandle, watching the brown dusty plains and the cattle pass by.  I came through here in 84 and spent the night in Amarillo, though I can’t recognize anything familiar when I pass through again.

My brother-in-law, Jay Smythe, left Kentucky on Monday, in the rain, to ride out and meet me somewhere on the road.  In Shamrock Texas, we rendezvous  in a Chevron station and go to look for a room for the night at the local Motel 6 across the road.  We’ve both had enough Texas for one day.   I unload the rig and Jay climbs in the car for a tour of Shamrock.  He’s only my third-ever passenger but I don’t hit anything or eject him while flying the car, so I must be getting the hang of  it.  He says it’s fun, though strange to be riding that low to the ground. A stop in the local gas station/ “beer cave” reveals that domestic brews, owned by the giant Imbev corporation are preferred here.  There is one sort of  locally made option, “Third Shift Amber” which says it is from Ft. Worth.  Pretty good, actually.

The motel, a clean and serviceable place, has a “family” restaurant next door.   We arrive a bit early for dinner, while the staff is still discussing last night’s game, the local high school happenings and what somebody did that perhaps they shouldn’t have done.  Eventually the regulars begin to trickle in, greeted each by name, and head for their “own” tables.  Thank goodness we didn’t inadvertently pick one of those.  Dinner is acceptable, though nothing to write home about…though I guess that is exactly what I’m doing.