Wednesday and Thursday, January 4th and 5th, 2006 - Driving from Illinois to Oklahoma.

The next day we continued on to St. Louis and southwest across the state of Missouri, putting up for the night at an RV park outside of Joplin. That park had the water spigots turned on, so we could hook up the water and flush the antifreeze from our water lines. We tested all our faucets and found no leaks, thank goodness, so that was one more system in the trailer that had survived ten months of storage intact. After dinner we settled in for the night with every intention of watching the Rose Bowl game, but the effort of finding and installing our new TV was daunting enough that instead we settled for reading a book together. We were on the second of Anne Perry's series of mysteries involving Inspector Monk in Victorian England, "A Dangerous Mourning", and both of us wanted to find out what happened next. We read until our eyes were too tired to continue and then turned out the lights for the night. Unfortunately, our campground was conveniently close to the interstate and we heard the roar of the trucks all during the night, which reminded me to avoid campgrounds right next to busy interstates! It surely seemed like we were relearning a lot of our old camping lessons during those first few days.

Leaving Joplin the next morning we soon entered Oklahoma, and I was amused by the steady progression of speed limits from 65 mph in Illinois to 70 mph in Missouri to 75 mph in Oklahoma. The increase in speed limits actually made life harder for me as I kept our speed down to 55-60 mph and thus had to hew to the right lane. The only effect of the increased speed limits for us was that the tractor trailers roared by me at ever increasing speeds, which tended to jostle us about a bit more.

Before we reached Tulsa I had enough of the big, fast toll way and decided to try US 69 to get a straighter, if slower, route to Dallas. A side benefit of this new route was that we could see more of eastern and central Oklahoma: despite being stationed at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for over a year in the 70s, I had never had the chance to see the eastern part of the state.

Route 69 was, as promised by the Rand MacNally Road Atlas, a four-lane divided highway running south and west through the eastern part of Oklahoma. The newly paved parts were quite pleasant and we ambled along at 50-55 miles per hour just enjoying the scenery. But the parts of Route 69 with old, sway-backed pavement made us hang on to our seats for dear life. In airplane parlance, I would have described our ride on those sections as "moderate turbulence"; it was severe enough that the door to the medicine cabinet in the trailer opened up and dumped the contents all over the bathroom floor. Curiously enough, the jostling then slammed the door back shut so that at the end of the day it looked like a magician or poltergeist had simply teleported our things from inside the cabinet to the floor of the bathroom! Monika also found one of our dishes had been smashed to pieces, which was a first for us and proved that even Corelle dinnerware can be broken.

But despite all that it was nice to see the eastern Oklahoma countryside, which turned out to be mostly farmland with old barns and some gently rolling wooded hills together with man-made lakes. Those lakes ranged from small farm ponds to the truly huge Lake Eufala that stretched on for many miles alongside Route 69. It looked like a great place to have a motorboat or sailboat in the summer, but January was too cold for boating, besides which we realized we had forgotten Mutt and Jeff, our inflatable boat, in the garage at home. Packing only the truck for this trip without having the trailer available had severely limited what we could take along, and the inflatable boat as well as our dulcimer and recorders were among the things that we had been forced to leave behind.

Large burned out areas, some quite extensive, reminded us of the wildfires that had plagued Oklahoma and Texas in the previous months. We were told that Oklahoma had only received 1/2 inch of rain in the previous 3 months, so the grass was really as dry as tinder and we could easily imagine the fires flaring up out of control. We also drove past reservations for the "Five Civilized Tribes" of Indians that had been settled in Oklahoma during Andrew Jackson's ethnic cleansing campaign in the early 1800s. I was amused to see that each of the five tribes had now achieved the extreme epitome of civilization, the tribal gambling casino! The intended victims of these establishments were no doubt the travelers on Route 69, but I'm sure that they also fleeced local folks along with the long-haul truckers and vacationers.

We put in for the night in Boggy Depot State Park in southern Oklahoma and once again had the odd feeling of being the only people in the entire campground. But the Ranger who collected our camping fee reassured us that nothing untoward had happened in the park for the past nine years, so we had a simple dinner and relaxed for the evening.

Monika was working away on the HTML conversion for Wanderung 10, so I revived another old tradition by calling up an e-book on Baby and curling up on the couch to read it. I decided to try Kipling's "Three Soldiers", which turned out to be a collection of short stories, almost vignettes, about the British army in India during the late 1800s. Kipling used an Irishman as the main storyteller for most of them and used unique spelling to imply the Irish accent. Once I worked my way past the odd spelling, however, the stories themselves offered fascinating glimpses into life in the British military in that time and place. Kipling made it all seem so real that I was left wondering what parts were actually real and what parts he had imagined or constructed, but I certainly couldn't tell myself.