Day 24 - Wednesday, August 12 (Drive from Canute, Oklahoma to Mountainburg, Arkansas)

Short drive today, but a long trip.

We are now back in the land of low elevation and high humidity, and the lack of AC is a real drag that takes its toll. Normally, when I drive any length of time, I enjoy listening to music, being with my thoughts, or talking with Vicki or the others. For over half of our 6000 mile trip, we have had to endure the blast of 95 degree wind to avoid sweating to death in the oven of our van, which means sweating for 6-9 hours while listening to a hurricane. And this after spending $1000 before and $200 during the trip to make sure the AC was in good shape. Today we realized that we will have to make some adjustments in the east, like traveling early (starting at 4 am) to avoid the highway during the hottest hours of the day.

The day began easily enough, sleeping in late (as usual) and enjoying a leisurely breakfast (oatmeal and bagels). We were blessed to have a shaded campsite, and didn’t get away until 11:00. After passing through Oklahoma City, we stopped for lunch and gas in Shawnee and I got pretty cranky with everyone. As we got back on the highway, I knew the heat had something to do with my attitude, but it was more than that. Interstate 40 through Oklahoma runs near the terminus of the infamous Trail of Tears, and is littered with names of tribes uprooted from their homelands in the east, from the Seminole to the Cherokee. Today, the highway is also littered with billboards for the many casinos.

Then and now, this road is paved with broken dreams. So I think it was more than the heat that got to me.

We also passed lots of towns that claimed notoriety based on famous sons and daughters. Yesterday, at the end of the trip, we saw a sign that let us know Elk City was the birthplace of Susan Powell, the 1981 Miss America winner who went on to have a career in opera. Today, we saw a sign that proclaimed Weatherford as the birthplace of Thomas P. Stafford, the astronaut who made the first flight of the lunar module to the moon in 1969 and commanded the Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975. And as we passed Okemah, 70 miles east of Oklahoma City, a sign let us know that we were passing the birthplace of Woody Guthrie, a folk musician nicknamed “the Dustbowl Troubadour” who wrote “This Land is Your Land”.

Just after 3 pm, we crossed into Arkansas and turned north on 540 for the final 15 miles to Fort Smith Lake State Park, at the western edge of the Ozark Mountains. We set up quickly and had supper before driving to Fort Smith, 30 miles southwest, to buy groceries and to find a theater showing the sixth Harry Potter movie. We got the groceries, but the GPS flubbed the first theater address (it routed us to a golf course!). We had a backup plan, and drove further south, across the Arkansas River, through the weather beaten town of Fort Smith, and found the Carmike 14 off Waco Street, where we got the whole theater to ourselves for the 8:00 show. We enjoyed the movie, popcorn and Coke and got back home just before midnight, where we crashed for another night under the stars.

Day 23 - Tuesday, August 11 (Drive from Santa Fe to Canute, Oklahoma)

This is the part of our trip that abounds in long driving days and comparatively few play days. Yet the drive is often a memorable part of our travel experience, and not merely a nuisance to be endured. While it's true that the AC has been inoperative since Salt Lake City (but for a brief - and expensive - respite between Moab and Grand Canyon), we have each made our peace with the experience of the wind roaring past the open windows at 70 mph for hours on end. We're not sure what we're going to do when it rains, but as we parallel the historic Route 66, we feel a kinship to those earlier explorers who braved the territory without the buffer of air conditioning.

Truth is, we can live without it. And this morning, we learned that we are going to live without it for the rest of the trip. The shop I drove to at 7:30 this morning in Santa Fe found the leak: a couple of O-ring seals in the condenser. To replace them requires several hours of labor, and since we had the AC system overhauled for this trip, I believe the repair might fall under warranty in Wilmington. At any rate, we did not have time to wait out the lengthy repair, so we opted to mush on across New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma sans chilled air.

And we survived.

We had lunch at a Micky D's in Tucamcari, New Mexico with a bunch of folk headed for Fresno, California on a Trailways Bus. Then we drove into Texas and a new time zone - as well as totally new topography. Gone were the mountains of New Mexico and Arizona (as well as 5000 more feet of elevation above sea level). Texas was flat as far as our eyes could see. We passed loud and proud Christians - notably a "Jesus is Lord (not a cuss word)" Truck Stop, the "Largest Cross In The Western Hemisphere"(!) and a silhouette of a cowboy kneeling before a cross. Though we blasted through towns with names like Conway, Groom, Wildorado, and Gruhlkey, it took a while to drive through Amarillo, home of the 72 ounce free steak (free, that is, if you can wolf it down - along with shrimp cocktail, salad, roll, and baked potato - in 60 minutes without throwing up!).

We gassed up at Shamrock, Texas, and got some ice cream, 65 miles from our destination. The 21 gallons of gas brought our total for this trip to 290 gallons, or $750 at an average $2.55 per gallon (more in the west). We've averaged just under 18 mpg tugging the trailer up and down mountains for lo these 5443 miles (with more than 1600 to go!). We made it past a last bit of road construction and pulled into site #42 at the KOA between Elk City and Clinton, Oklahoma, where we'll bed down for the night.

Vicki fixed a great supper of ham and sweet potatoes on the grill, and green beans, and we enjoyed a beautiful sunset "sooner" than we thought possible (heh, heh). Tomorrow it's back on the road for a short leg to Lake fort Smith State Park in Mountainburg, Arkansas (a piddly little 300 mile jaunt), and a day to explore the Ozark mountains. Then on to Nashville, Virginia, and home!

As I close today's blog entry, I can hear the sounds of trucks rolling along I-40, not more than several hundred yards from where we have set up camp. It's just as well, for this memorable month, the highway has become our home. The highways we have traveled have opened up a storehouse of treasures across America this summer, as we have driven past (and marveled at) endless lakes, breathtaking mountains, and vast prairies and fields. We've been able to stop and savor a small percentage of what we have driven past along the way. I have been reminded on this trip of the riches that abound in this country - far beyond the time any of us are given to explore and appreciate them.