(And the wavin’ wheat
Can sure smell sweet
When the wind comes right behind the rain)
Yes, we are in Oklahoma. No, the ride today was not OK.
Right off the bat, allow me to set the record straight: it may have rained yesterday, and the wind may have come right behind the rain, but we saw no wavin’ wheat (just soybeans and roadkill), and nothing smelled sweet. And neither Richard Rodgers or Oscar Hammerstein ever biked 68 miles into the teeth of a 25 mph headwind. Nor did Curly, Laurey, Jud, or Ado Annie. (But I’ll cut Ado Annie some slack, because she would do it if someone asked her to.)
We knew last night that we’d be biking into a headwind today—straight out of the south—for most of the ride. But what was billed as a 10-15 mph wind with gusts up to 25 mph was in actuality a 25 mph wind with brief lulls of 15 mph. And it was hot. And our experimentation with Apple Maps to avoid busy roads with narrow shoulders had us biking on gravel roads on two separate occasions. And there were very few, bordering on zero, decent places to stop for rehydration and nourishment.
I’m relatively accustomed to biking into headwinds in Illinois, but I can’t remember ever biking into this heavy a wind for this long a time. It was just brutal. And while the shoulders were usually wide enough to keep us clear of high-speed traffic, there were several times when we were riding the same tightrope that we biked yesterday… with the main difference being that today it was a challenge to take one hand off the handlebars to grab your water bottle.
There were only two positives to emerge from today’s labors: #1, we did it, and #2, as we continue to make our way on Route 66, “Joplin to Vinita” will live in infamy as a real m*****f***** of a day.
We are in Vinita tonight, and as Jon and I were walking to dinner I had the realization that I’d been here before—in fact, at the very same hotel—eighteen years ago, in August of 2005. Ed Harris, Mike Monarchi and I were taking our third (and, so far, final) Civil War battlefield tour of the “Trans-Mississippi Theater”: numerous skirmishes and a couple of Class-A Decisive battles in northern Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri and Oklahoma. We had visited Wilson’s Creek in SW Missouri and stopped in Vinita as we made our way back to Dallas and our flights home.
That night in 2005, we crossed the street from the hotel to watch a little event at a small rodeo arena (which—when I saw the arena again—is what triggered the memory). We left the event when the temperature dropped, the wind picked up, and the sky turned green. None of the locals left, but we were all convinced that we would be killed by a Cat 5 tornado. Anyway, we went back to the hotel, where we had checked into one of the suites. As Ed and I were watching Dr. Strangelove on TV, Mike called out from the bathroom, “Hey- this is weird. I have hundreds of little dots all over my ankles.” It turned out that Ed and I had the same little dots, except they weren’t dots, they were chiggers. And we were infested with them. We tried using alcohol wipes that night to kill as many as we could, but it was too late, and the next several days were agonizing.
So as I sit here tonight with really, really sore legs, I am at least relieved that I won’t also have itchy ankles to contend with.
Tomorrow: Tulsa. (And the cycling gods are delivering a thunderstorm tonight that is supposed to drop the temperature and put the wind at our back for the final day. Fingers crossed.)
Rideworthy 