July 10.
In Lawton we got to see the Wichita Mountains, which are quite ancient—so ancient that they really aren’t very high any more. They were beautiful and rugged. On the way to Pauls Valley, named after someone named Smith Paul, I learned that Oklahoma can be quite beautiful. And here is a Wikipedia tidbit: “Smith Paul, born in 1809 in New Bern, North Carolina, discovered the fertile bottom land which is now Pauls Valley while a member of a wagon train traveling to California. Paul described the land as ‘a section where the bottom land was rich and blue stem grass grew so high that a man on horseback was almost hidden in its foliage.'”
We went up and down a lot of hills before our arrival, after about 79 or 80 miles. I had a couple extra, unscheduled miles because I turned the wrong way once and rode for a mile before I figured it out and backtracked. Near the end, I just hoped that this was the last hill before we descended into the valley for which our destination was named.
The whole ride was beautiful and also very hot. I haven’t had much exposure to Oklahoma. I think we camped somewhere in the Panhandle sometime when I was a kid, but I’m not sure. I’ve read Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath in which the Joads lost their land in the dust bowl days, and I also knew that this was the destination of the Trail of Tears and the location of a lot of Indian Reservations. So, I was surprised to learn that it was pretty out here. (Sorry for my prior ignorance if I have managed to offend you.) I guess I thought it was more like the desert out in Nevada or New Mexico—which are beautiful but they are hardly green at all.
The exciting thing in the evening was we got to go to the local aquatic center for showers. It was an amazing facility for such a small town. The official population is just over 6000, but when we said that after looking it up, the local pastor kind of scoffed at such an idea. So I think he was including more of the surrounding population than just what was in the city limits. Doesn’t really matter—it was a great little town with the people really cooperating to have the best they could for the community and the local school.
In the evening, Steve got several of us out to play volleyball in the sand volleyball court. I could not believe that I had energy to play volleyball after riding 80 miles that day! So that’s cool. I didn’t run around a lot and I wasn’t a star, but I did have a good time.
The other major event was that the combination on one of our settable locks was inadvertently changed and we couldn’t get the door to the trailer open. So a couple of people were outside trying to break into the trailer and the sheriff’s deputy stopped by! They asked him to shoot the lock off! He said if someone were locked in there, he could have done it, but just to break in to the trailer he could not.
So, what happened. Did you ever get into the trailer? Is this “To be continued?”
They managed to break the lock and we got a new one.