Wednesday, 31 March 2021
At 1:00 AM (I looked at the clock), we suddenly got a deluge of rain, and I saw lightning through the skylight. I didn't hear thunder, which doesn't usually bother me anyway, and went right back to sleep. But in the morning I found Gracie huddled by the bathroom door, having apparently tried to get in so she could cower in the shower (heh). I knew that thunderstorms had been predicted so, thinking ahead for once, I'd put her Thunder Shirt on her last night. Don't know if it helped or not, because I don't know if we even had thunder. Well, I tried.
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| today's route |
As I was leaving Mt. Pleasant, I saw a sign at a business that said, "I have never faked a sarcasm in my life."
I also passed a nice little lake and recreation area just outside of town. That helped explain the billboards I'd seen when I was traveling east from Possum Kingdom the other day, advertising Mt. Pleasant with views of lake-connected activities.
Not far out of town I ran into what seemed like a hailstorm of big bugs that splattered so completely on the windshield I honestly couldn't see the road. I found a Dollar General that was still closed and pulled into its parking lot to reclean the windows I'd spent so much time cleaning just yesterday. One of those bugs was caught in the wipers, but I didn't know what kind it was. Big and black is all I know.
And only a few miles farther on, once I got back on the road, we got a sudden burst of heavy rain. If I still had a windshield covered with bug bodies, running the wipers over that would have made a terrible mess so I was glad I'd stopped when I did (though the lack of visibility gave me little choice).
Traveling north, I came to a string of small towns - like Deport, pop. 578 - that were 5 or 10 or 15 miles apart, separated by large farms. I saw lots of plowed fields, more of that green grassy crop, orchards, cows, lots of school zones actively functioning again.
In Paris ("Always a Good Idea"), where I visited a few months ago, I saw a billboard for a collision repair shop: "Highly Wreck-O-Mended."
And not much farther along the road I came to "Welcome To Oklahoma." I'd crossed the Red River without even noticing it, so low was its water level.
One of those electronic highway signs said, "Help Out Our Peeps - Stay Aware In Construction Zones." They want people to stay off their phones, of course. I was just taken by their use of "peeps." Don't remember seeing a highway department do that before.
The storm that brought last night's rain was traveling with us, I guess, because we got occasional rain - sometimes quite heavy - all during the day. There was also a very strong, cold, northerly wind that made steering really hard for much of the day. It was odd, but I'd noticed back in Mt. Pleasant that the temperature was brisk but not bad. But by the time we'd gotten up to Antlers in southern OK, the air had gotten downright chilly. Made walking the dogs very unappealing.
In Atoka, I saw a sign advertising a roofing company: Son of the Most High Roofing. The sign showed a drawing of a cross, tilted over to rest on the cross bar, with a man climbing up the long beam as if he were a worker climbing a roof. At what point does appropriation of religious symbols become blasphemy?
I noticed that the trees up here were just starting to leaf out. Maybe I'll get to see spring again when I'm in Missouri.
The Choctaw Nation owns 8 casinos, and I started feeling like I was passing all of them - it just seemed like I saw seeing one after another after another.
I came to an area with a lot of redbuds - several miles of them - and they made a nice change in a landscape that was still in the pre-spring stage (blah).
In and around McAlester, I saw a series of billboards posted by a local labor union, protesting the upcoming closure of an aerospace plant. One said, "You have prospered here. Don't devastate our town by closing down your plant." Another said, "Honor your commitments." And a third said merely, "Shame on you." I looked it up and found a request for an injunction the union filed last month in court. Interesting point of view. https://www.mcalesternews.com/lawsuit-spirit-violated-cba-in-plant-closure-plan
I don't know how I missed this part of the state when I spent my month in Oklahoma, but I quite clearly did - on the map (above) the blue line is where I traveled in August, and the orange line is where I traveled today. So in August I missed seeing Lake Eufala, which my mom and I had seen on a trip some years ago. Once seen, hard to forget, because this lake goes for miles. Actually, I can't find anybody online to tell me how long the lake is; the most I get is that it offers 600 miles of shoreline. It's a long, narrow lake and various bridges cross a whole lot of it lengthwise. Fortunately, they're all easy bridges to drive on, so I mostly just enjoyed the scenery. Naturally, it's a very popular recreation destination.
From the time I turned north in Atoka, I was on US 69, and I realized part way through I should have been keeping count of the number of construction areas I went through. Some were just a nuisance with the road narrowed to 2 lanes and no shoulders, but there were several areas that were one-lane-at-a-time.
At one of the construction areas, I saw 12 empty dump trucks of various sizes waiting in a long line to be loaded with dirt from whatever today's version of a steam shovel is - and I saw maybe half a dozen more coming down the road to take their place in line. That's a lot of dirt they're moving.
North of Muskogee I crossed the Verdigris River at a point where it balloons out into something almost like a lake. And I counted 8 Great Egrets fishing along the shore, with 4 more flying around. No telling how many others were there that I couldn't see from the road. That's a lot of Great Egrets.
At the town of Chouteau, with a population around 2,100, it seemed like I was seeing an awful lot of antiques stores. Now that I've looked it up, I see that TripAdvisor's list of Things To Do In Chouteau has 9 things - all antiques stores.
The point of today's drive was to get from Mt. Pleasant as close to Missouri as I could. Google told me it would be a 5-hour drive to tonight's campground, and it took me about 8½.
When we got to the KOA, the Will Rogers Downs was quite actively involved in horse races, so I had to be careful to keep the race track out of sight when I walked the dogs. They both go bonkers when they see horses.
And when I registered, I learned that many of the others in the campground were there for a dog show. I saw 2 Great Danes (in the same RV), 2 Dobermans (in separate RVs), 2 Poodles (in the same RV, but only one of which had a show-type haircut), and 3 big Golden Retrievers (in the same RV). These were all beautiful dogs, clearly healthy and bouncy and well-groomed and well-mannered. Made me feel like a bad mother for neglecting mine so much. And I had to be careful when I walked mine to avoid sight of all of them, along with the horses, which was a little tricky at times.
It was a lot of driving today, but it means I can spend most of my first day in Missouri actually being in Missouri, instead of traveling to get there.
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