We see funny (and interesting) stuff

Although I've been trying to catch photos of the funny signs we find, I can't always get a good shot.  Sometimes I'm just too tired to capture it.

In Albuquerque, there was a hand-painted advertisement at a freeway exit that was quite enticing:
BATES MOTEL
Mother's Homestyle Cooking
Every room has a Shower
Family-Run
Follow signs


When we first crossed into Oklahoma ranch land, there was a Burma Shave-style sign:
I Scream
You Scream
We all Scream
For pork loins


As we were leaving Pawhuska, OK - which is one of the larger towns (ie, not a ghost town), there was a white house with a fence around the yard, right on main street.  On the front door was posted:  PRIVATE PROPERTY.
It seemed like a touchy subject, so I didn't take a picture.

Almost all of the small towns in Texas and Oklahoma have large signs as you enter city limits, that regale visitors with past sports glories.  Usually they are quite large, like 10' x 10'.   "Welcome to Pond Creek - home of the 1990 state wrestling champions."  "You are entering HORNET territory - boy's state track champions 1986, 1987, 1989."   Some even list the names of the kids on the teams.  Like the 1962 championship baseball team of Laverne.


Riding along for hours, I need entertainment.  I'm glad we're riding at this time of year, because the weather isn't too bad, and everything is as green as it gets.  Everything is blooming;  all the animals have babies.  There is activity and the scenery is beautiful.  Sweating is also distracting.


Yesterday I was riding past a farmhouse several miles from town.  A bird whipped out of the mailbox in front of me as I was chugging along.  I stopped to look in, and there was a nest of tiny newly-hatched babies.  I tried to take a picture, but I couldn't make it come out right.  (I swear, they were still alive when I left.)


We talk to people to find out about what's going on in the area sometimes.  We talked to a trucker at the saltwater tanks that were painted with the Peanuts characters out in the middle of the fields.  He was filling his tanker with salt water to deliver to the natural gas field pumps.  When they drill to get the gas, there is water on top of the gas and it rushes up to the surface.  So they pump salt water down first because it's heavier and it holds down the ground water so they can go past it and get to the gas.

We also found that May is wheat harvest hearabouts.  The neighbors get together and help each other roll the cut wheat into great rolled bales.  The women drive out with meals for everybody and they have a tailgate party and then get back to work.  They keep working past dark because you never know when it's going to rain.  The huge trucks and combiners have lights.

The oil fields are being upgraded and Conoco Phillips is putting up workers at all the small hotels and rv campgrounds.  They're making extra money by working in the fields away from home.  Shifts work around the clock and pass each other in the breakfast rooms at the Best Western, some on their way to bed and some on their way out to the field.  Their huge boots are in the hallway outside their rooms.

I have been listening to audiobooks, and off and on I listen to some music, but I only wear one earbud, because it doesn't seem safe to block your hearing when you're the smallest fish in the current.  Plus, it's illegal (as I point out to Peter almost daily.)  So, the music is sometimes suboptimal, if it's in stereo.

Listening to something really helps with endurance.  But I can't do it every day.  So I do things to keep busy, like count the number of dead animals and discarded gloves.  It's instructive.  I've learned that truckers must think that work gloves are disposable.  Also, in Oklahoma, work gloves are available in children's sizes.  I've also found out that truckers seem to perform their hygienic activities on the road, as evidenced by prodigious quantities of tissues, eye-drop bottles, empty prescription bottles, combs, brushes, dental floss picks, q-tips, and unsanitary Gatorade bottles (re-filled).  (If you get my drift.) 

One could study their culture from their garbage.  If one was so inclined.

Oklahoma Biking

People of the Wind

With Peter's penchant for meeting Folks, we seem to attract crowds at every mini-mart. 
Jim (our driver) decided that his favorite quote of Peters is:  "Mini-mart ice machines make life worth living."

In Jet, Oklahoma (don't you wish you thought of it) we stopped for ice and water and the young lady at the cash register told us- oh, if you're using your own bottles, just fill up on whatever you like.  Peter started gulping something called "Sunkist Cherry Limeade," and suddenly became very animated.

The pile of shirtless little kids with crayons jumped down from the dinette and swarmed around him, asking about the bikes and gear and where the heck we had come from.  We drank soda and chatted about our trip for half an hour.  They wanted to hear over and over, "How many miles you think you come so far?"  "Ain't Virginia on t'other side of the ocean?"  "When you think you gonna get there?"  "You know any movie stars?"

It felt a little like we had dropped out of a space ship.  Their mother was carrying around a sleeping toddler.  She told us all about the kids and how these were hers and those were her friend's, who was working at the store.  "Now these two, Brittany and Kenneth, their daddy's dead.  Had an asthma attack and died.  He was about oh, 33, I guess.  He's with Jesus now.  But I met a real nice man who's real sweet to me and to the kids."  Real sweet, judging from her advanced pregnancy.

The kids followed us out to the bikes, showing us the tricks they could do on the hand railing of the steps.  Watch me, watch this, lookit what I can do.  I got a bike, but I can't ride it on the street.  My friends call me Yoda 'cause my ears stick out.  Look how far they stick out.  Don't you think I look like Yoda?  This is my new dress.  I got another dress, but it don't fit me.  My sister goes to school here, but I go in Enid.  But school's out now, so I don't go.

Then a farmer or rancher got out of a truck and asked, "So you folks are ridin' across the country?"  We had kind of gotten used to the word getting around in a small town if we stayed longer than a few minutes.  He wanted to know what route we were taking and how we manage the trucks and where we sleep.  Peter chatted with him and asked him if he had Internet access.  "Nah, we don't have nothin' like that." 

In Good Company

Little sister Valerie here.

I took the liberty of posting because as I was reading about the wind sweeping down the plain, I remembered an excerpt from a 1935 letter we have that Grandpa Ribley wrote to his family.  He and a buddy were traveling from California from Ohio and once the "weather" in Kansas, they ended up turning around and hitchiking back to California!  Here’s what he says about the plain states:

“Well I guess I’ll tell about the dust first.  We had dust all the way from Portales, N.M. but it wasn’t bad and we didn’t have it all the time.  We got as far as Dodge City, Kan. and that was that.  Most of the time people had their lights lit in the daytime.  When the wind didn’t blow, the dust fell like rain.  But when the wind blew it was terrible.  We thought it would let up and we could go on but it never did so we had to sell our car because we couldn’t drive it.  We hitch-hiked back, that’s why I never wrote because I knew Mom would worry.”

So it looks like fighting the wind in the plain states is a well-absorbed legacy.

And your grasshopper tales remind me of when we moved to Utah in the summer of ’82.  When I would ride my bike down the road, the grasshoppers would jump all around in a frenzy from every angle.  I always had beheaded carcasses in my spokes.  Ick. 

Love you – keep on pedaling!

The wind is ALWAYS sweeping down the plain

Oklahoma should be called "The Windy State."

We have been blown forward, backward and sideways.  I have a feeling it messes up my hair, but no one has said anything.  I think they are just being polite.

In addition, it is much hotter here than in the desert.  We are having trouble sleeping at night and have been using the air conditioning quite a lot.  Probably because of our advanced age, it is effecting us more than it effects Alana.  More than I remember the heat effecting me.  After all, Peter and I both used to live in Arizona, the hottest place on earth.I have been riding with a bandana covering my face- my delicate skin.  I don't want to wind up like an old rattle snake.  We are on our fourth bottle of SPF 60+ sunscreen with zinc oxide.

The shoulders on the roads are much smaller here.  We have been riding on smaller highways to try to avoid major traffic, but still people are honking and are not too happy with us being on their road.  There are still trucks, but mostly just farming and irrigation support-type trucks, plus local workers.  The road garbage factor is vastly reduced.

However, yesterday was a record for discarded gloves:  56.  It's stunning, really, work gloves, rubber gloves, disposable latex gloves, cotton gardening gloves-  orange, grey, white, blue, green.  BUT no yellow or red.

Also, there are vast, unending seas of rustling wheat fields on all sides of us at times.  It's amazing how it feels like you can't see land as far as you can see.

Since arriving in Oklahoma a few days ago, we started seeing grasshoppers everywhere.  They are green and brown.  The larger ones, which may be a different type, are about 2 inches long and have red lines all along their edges.  They are also splattered all over the road and the camper.  Unfortunately.
But it's not like a plague of locusts or anything.

Peter is getting to be a much stronger rider.  He hasn't missed any riding since New Mexico, and we have found that his steady pace carries him through even when I am flagging after 50 miles.  50 seems to be my drop off point.  After that I make about 8 miles an hour.

It's Spring and there are babies everywhere.  Baby cows, horses, horny toads and birds.

We were riding along and saw a large white horse in a field, then a large brown horse.   Then two awkward little white-and-brown pinto foals tottered up between them.  It was so cute I fell off my bike.  Not really.

We stopped to have lunch in the camper at a parking lot next to a veterinarian's office.  Turns out it was the county vet where all the horses with money go to have their babies.  Alana was in seventh heaven.

We found a motel that has an rv camp in the rear.  So we are raiding it.  We are restocking ice, tp, shampoo, oatmeal, hot chocolate, etc.  Plus, we have eaten our weight at the complementary continental breakfast.  Well worth the $27 camping fee.

Hope to see some sights in Oklahoma City before we take Alana to the airport this afternoon.  Jim and Alana Moylan will be driving the camper for us tomorrow...

Life on the farm

Aside from roadkill, we have been having lots of animal interaction. The first day we were in New Mexico, I was riding along the farmland and came across a lady on a quad, chasing two bulls. She was doing a mini-roundup. But gingerly. Each time she got close to the bulls and tried to urge them toward the gate, she was quite bold until one of them looked at her or turned toward her. Then she would quickly back off.

As I started to pass, she yelled to me, “Hey, could you open that gate across the street for me?” I looked over, and it was a gate just like at my friend Bronwyn’s house. So I went over and opened it. She yelled thanks and I watched her wrestle with the bulls some more. It looked to me like one side of the road was a giant field with a fence and a gate and the other side of the road was another giant field with a fence and a gate. By “giant,” I mean that you couldn’t see the ends of these fields on any other side.

So I would have left the two bulls where they were, if it were me.

Peter also has been having a lot of cow herding experience. The past week, in Texas and Oklahoma, each time we see a herd of cows at the fence, Peter yells, “Moo” at them. He just moos and moos. The reaction is almost always the same. The cows look at us and look at him for about a minute or less, and then they all turn and run. Then Peter yells, “Did you see that? I caused another stampede!” So, Peter gets to feeling like he’s causing cow movement.

Every day we see lots of dead snakes. Most are squashed flat by trucks, but some look like they’re still alive. Yesterday, Peter swerved to miss one and it jumped into the grass to get away. He swore that it was five feet long. I missed it. BUT, about an hour later, as I was making up a rap version of “Road Garbage Litany,” I saw a small brown snake jump away from my bike. It gives you a thrill.

We also saw our first dead armadillo, which was sad.

Turns out in Oklahoma, you can hunt turtles. The limit is six per day per person, so they must be plentiful.  But you can't shoot them.  Consequently, we've started seeing dead turtles on the road.

Oklahoma is the Windy State.  We don't like wind.  Peter thinks we should vote Oklahoma off the island.  Seems like the wind is one of the reasons we couldn't find many biking routes through the state.

Since leaving Arizona, we haven't seen much effort at recycling.  It seems weird to not be able to find a place to deposit cans and bottles at least, but you can't.   Also, there aren't many places in Oklahoma so far to get an Internet connection.  So, we have to publish our blog updates when we can...

We slept in the ghost town of Elmwood the other night.  It was spooky and there was a dog on the roof of an old broken down building across the street from us.  Alana spotted some kids and went to talk to them.  She asked, "How does the dog get on the roof?"  The boy answered, "Easy.  He goes out the winda on the balcony."  Of course.   His name is Chester.  The dog's, not the boy's.

Biking in Texas

Guess What? We're in Texas!

Hey, Y'all - ALL Y'all -    we made it to Texas and got to see some of Amarillo on a rest day.
We saw the wonderful Cadillac Ranch, where there are 8 to 10 Cadillacs buried nose-down in a line just off the highway in a field.  It looks like a funeral procession gone wrong.

 Alana receiving the camper keys...

We took Don & Jeannette to the Rick Husband International Airport in Amarillo and had a beer.  Then we picked up Alana (Lewis) and drove back to our stopping point at the border of New Mexico and Texas near Nara Visa.






When we started riding in Texas, I saw a breast implant sample model on the road.  (I put a photo of it here, but it got blocked.)  Naturally, I had to imagine the conversation that went on before it went out the window on the highway...
"Honey, I finally decided on the shape for my new implant!  The doctor let me bring the model sample home for you to see!"
"What!  Give me that!  No way is this perky enough!"
"HEY---I was supposed to bring that back to the doctor's office!"

We were only in Texas for a few days.

Biking in NM

Roadside Detritus, the Horizon, and RV Effluence

After riding in the rain for a few hours, and getting blasted by overspray from trucks as we rode on the freeway, we decided to have Mothers' Day dinner at a diner in Santa Rosa, New Mexico.  Peter figured out how to reschedule for the shorter day, and I worked on cleaning the bikes.

Today was better.  I was riding along, minding my own business, in fact, I was composing The Alphabetical Index of Road Waste, when I noticed that there was an antelope standing next to the fence on the side of the freeway.  I stopped and took its picture.  Then it snorted and ran away.  It had a big white tuft of fur on its rear end.
So This is where The Antelope Play.

Maybe I should organize the guide to roadside detritus by color categories instead.


--------------------------------
From Peter:
The country is really, really big!!!! It is an outrageous experience to spend hours climbing up to the top of a pass and turn around and look back at what you just rode across. When you see mountains in the distance behind you, and in front of you, it is difficult to embrace that you just rode from horizon to horizon... and that you have been doing it for nearly 26 days!

Have you ever had to make a life and death decision related to the poop tube on an RV?  While dumping the effluence from our support RV into a truck stop tank today, the coupling to the RV broke off and I had to reach "into the flow" to shut off the valve.  It was horrifying to say the least... but I had to "take one for the team" and stem the tide! At least I had wimpy gloves on.  After this harrowing incident I dove into a truck stop pay shower to detox.