If the speed limit is 80 mph, I might lock the cruise control on at 60 mph. I get better gas mileage, and no deer have hit me. This morning on a road with a 65 mph speed limit, and with my cruise control locked in at a racy double nickel, a couple of cars came up on me, like they usually do. At the passing lane I sped up to 80 like all good Alaskan motor home drivers do. No, I moved to the right and the two cars sped up to 80 or more to get by me.
When both cars were just a little ahead of me a deer jumped out. The first car I don’t even think they saw the deer cuz they never slowed. The second car braked, and that was the car I was sure was having venison for breakfast, but that deer had wings on its hoofs and flew across the highway. Close call fur sure.
My plan had been to book a site in Hot Springs National Park
and spend two days reviving in the healing mineral water of Hot Springs Arkansas.
My plan was foiled by too many visitors to Hot Springs
National Park as it is reserved into December. Not wanting to stay that long in
Arkansas I decided to bypass hot springs and go check out the winding stair
state park in Oklahoma.
I still had to drive through hot springs, and it was around
8 am so when the traffic slowed, I assumed that it was rush hour delay.
Unfortunately, traffic had not slowed because of congestion, it slowed because a Gold Winger Was Down. The bike was slammed up on the highway divider, and the rider was laying in the road, with people and Police, there to help. I will never know if the rider was going to make it or not, but all the best to you Goldwing rider, hope you are okay.
Oklahoma is west of me, so I headed that way. I thought I
would camp at the Winding Staircase State Park.
The drive in was enjoyable and had I been here a week or so
the fall colors would have been brilliant, but they were past their prime, and
only a rusty brown remained, and I thought I might have detected snow on the
trees at the crest of the hill…. But I convinced myself it must just be frost,
as the sun hasn’t hit it yet.
There were little clumps of snow along side the road, but I thought
it must be cotton that blew off the big cotton trucks, even though there are no
cotton fields around here.
When I got to the park the office was boarded up, and it was snow atop the kiosk, and a big sign that said road not plowed.
I started thinking about how wonderful it would be to be
trapped by winter at the end of a road in Oklahoma, and how in the spring when
they found my body, they would say what a lightweight Alaskan I was. But then I
remembered when I was in McGrath one winter long ago, and it was -75 and the
coldest place in Alaska, and I survived that sitting in the lodge, so if I was
going to perish by weather, I was going to do it at home where it is not Oklahoma.
My next plan B for Oklahoma was to get out of it, by going
west and avoiding the interstate, and I did both. I stuck mainly to Route 9
that took me through some interesting little towns. Seminole and Tecumseh, one
town named after a tribe, and the other named after the Shawnee chief, and not
the motor on my lawn mower.
They got me right in, and I should have known when I spotted
the motor company’s outpost’s sign several blocks away, that this service was going to cost more
than the last. It did as they upsold me more filters, and a Ford recommended fuel
system cleaning and meditation, and so far, it seems aggregable to the van.
After Moore I dropped back down to highway 152, all the way to highway 34 where I turned north and spend my last night at Foss State Park on Foss Reservoir where there were lots of Osprey’s and in camp lots of robins, that all vanished as the wind began to blow, and rattle the trees and shake the van.
No comments:
Post a Comment