Thursday, September 30, 2021

Trip Day 3

...forgot to take a mileage pic when I got to the hotel, so that'll have to wait till tomorrow.

Went further than planned today as hotels in Tulsa were full as it is the first day of the State Fair.

I was feeling pretty good, so I pushed on about 45 minutes more (OKC was 90 minutes) to Stroud. That's not too bad as it helps shorten what was planned to be the longest stretch tomorrow.

Original plan was ~8-1/2 driving time today to Tulsa, then 9-1/2 to Santa Fe. Left at 7:30, made Tulsa a 5pm to the hotel I wanted -- so 9-1/2 hours including my stops to stretch and get gas. Putzed around a bit in Tulsa, then found a hotel room in Stroud that seemed reasonable drive. So probably 9-1/4-ish hours driving the "main line" today and that will cut tomorrow to just under 9 hours driving.

So far, much of the trip hasn't seemed much different from the wooded Interstates I'm used to since I'm keeping along the southern edge of the midwest/great plains so far. Bits of Indiana and a stretch in Illinois was definitely flat farm country but the Missouri portion is mostly the Ozarks. Oklahoma is the most different -- I'm surprised by how many trees there were in the cattle ranch country; but the trees were definitely much more sparse and had thick grasses growing between them.






Much of I-44 in Missouri had a frontage road along it. Some of those looked like they could be the original US-66/US-166 road beds but I haven't finished researching that.

I kind of liked it -- no sharp curves, a few steep but not too steep hills (Pennsylvania/Ohio/Kentucky I had to watch for grades where my cruise control couldn't maintain speed); and a lot of commercial development / billboards at regular intervals so it wasn't just a monotone of trees.


I want to say you haven't seen ominous skys till you see an ominous sky in Oklahoma...but I was a few miles shy of the state line when this brief storm hit:



Oklahoma Line:



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