The Cycling Preacher

July 13.

This was an interesting day.  We got to cycle in three different states going from Idabel, OK to Texarkana.  We started, of course, in Oklahoma.  The total ride was about 75 miles and at mile 29 we crossed into Arkansas.  Then at mile 63.8 we went back into Texas, and 0.8 miles further on, we were back in Arkansas again!  In Texarkana, one post office serves both Texarkana, Texas and Texarkana, Arkansas.  Texarkana, Arkansas is the larger of the two cities.  There is one road in town where you can walk on one side of the street and be in Texas, but on the other side of the street you are in Arkansas.  I had heard of Texarkana before, but I thought it was a region rather than a city (or two)

In the place where we were in Texas just briefly, we could see the Arkansas welcome center from the same place where we could see the Texas welcome sign.  It seemed a bit odd.

When we rode along Route 66 and ran into some less than ideal pavement, Henry declared that “Smooth Pavement Appreciation Day.”  There were a few miles on this day when we could have declared “Pavement Appreciation Day.”  There was a short section of chip and seal that had just been put down, so it was pretty much like loose gravel.  Then there was another place where we passed a sign saying “County Maintenance ends here.”  It was pretty clear that no one was maintaining that section!  There were a couple of places where the gravel was pretty deep.

July 12.

This was the chance to complete a century ride—probably the least hilly one we have on the trip, certainly the least hilly so far.  It was another hot day.  I started out slow, one of the last to start because of a last minute task I needed to do.  Judy and Lou were serving as sweeps that day.  They had already managed to complete a couple of century rides, the first one in Nevada.  Judy asked if I wanted them to ride with me or behind me.  I said with me, but I don’t think she heard me because they started out staying farther back.  Then when I entered a road, they stopped at the corner.  So I kept going.  At the first rest stop, they finally caught me, though it took much longer than I expected.  Lou had gotten a flat along the way.

The little hand pumps we carry on our bikes can get enough air in the tires to get back on the road, but a floor pump is needed to really get the tire inflated well.  Lou was having trouble getting the pump seated on the valve, so I offered to do it for her.  She wanted her tire inflated to 120 psi, and then changed her mind and asked for it to be inflated to 110 psi.  At 110 psi, the inner tube blew and the tire came off the rim!  So time for another change.  They were at the rest stop, and there were spare tubes in the trailer so we got her flat fixed again and also found a hole in the brand new tire that she had just put on the night before.  All set to go again.

I told them that they didn’t need to stay behind me, assuming  that they had not heard what I said previously.  But I left after the tire was on the rim, but before it was pumped up and back on the bike.  They have always managed to catch me in the past, so I knew they could do it again.

This pretty pond was on the way to the first rest stop, I think.  I hardly took any pictures that day!

The worst part of the day was a section of construction that we went through.  I was pretty scared and I surprised myself by getting a lot of speed after having already gone about 60 miles.  I had no idea that I had that kind of speed left in me.  I certainly didn’t have it in me before I felt like I really, really needed to hurry.  I don’t have any pictures of that.

Between the second and third rest stop, a man stopped us.  He had a water jug that belonged to us that Phil and Kian had left at a gas station a ways back.  We didn’t have any way to carry it and we told him that if he left it by the side of the road, we would send someone back to get it.  Instead, he asked where he could take it.  So he took it to the next rest stop at the Hugo Lake Overlook for us, probably another ten miles down the road.

And that story reminds me of an even better one from the day before!  Meredith and Steve had stopped in a coffee shop on the way.  They were sweeps, riding behind me, and that is one of the things Meredith likes to do.  We got to one of the rest stops and found out that Mike W was behind us and that he had Meredith’s wallet.  Meredith and Steve didn’t know how that was possible, that Mike could have a) gotten behind them and b) stopped in the same random, off the route, coffee shop.  What had actually happened was that the coffee shop owner saw her wallet and went driving around looking for cyclists in orange shirts.  Mike had missed a turn in an entirely different place but that put him in position to be spotted by the coffee shop owner!

Back to the hundred mile day:  At the last rest stop, Judy and Lou were very encouraging.  I always worry about slowing the others down since the sweeps are required not to pass me, and they are always better riders than I (still improving and still the slowest).  It they had been the slightest bit hesitant, I would not have tried it.  But I took a short break, got a Starbucks Doubleshot to drink, and ended up finishing a lot faster than I had been going previously.

When we got in, a whole bunch of people came out to cheer!  That is the first 100 mile day that I have completed since 1983 on the first RAGBRAI tour I ever went on when I was 26 years old.  (I’m pretty sure that is correct)  And I got tears in my eyes again.  Big day.

July 11.

In Pauls Valley, I wanted to take a photo of the church in the morning, but then I saw that the sun was just coming up so I ran around the building to get that photo instead!  Looks good!  The ride was full of rolling hills and green meadows and trees.  I got hot and decided to call it a day at the last rest stop, cutting off some 15 or 20 miles of the ride.  My original goal was to ride every mile that week, but I was starting to feel a little too hot.  To tell the truth, sometimes I think I don’t push myself as hard as I should.  I’m not entirely sure which is better.  But we were supposed to ride 100 miles the next day, and it was probably the least hilly of all the century rides (100 miles or more) that we will have.  Whether it was a good decision or not, that is what I decided.  And to tell the truth, I don’t remember too much more about that entire day or where we stayed in the evening.  It was at a Baptist Church and that’s all I know.

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.

July 9.

We had an excellent host in Lawton, OK.  The church we were staying at was in downtown Lawton, First Christian Church.  The pastor was headed out to the General Assembly in Indianapolis, so Henry was the speaker for the day.  Tom Springli hosted us the entire time we were there.  He drove us around in the church van, got up and started breakfast early in the morning, stayed overnight with us, and even took us on an outing in the afternoon.

The church hosts breakfast for whoever comes on Sunday mornings, and they also have an Agape meal on Wednesday evenings.  Including us, during the morning church service, it was announced that 143 meals were provided that morning.  I don’t know if that includes seconds.  It didn’t really seem like a hundred people went through.

This was the best chance I have had to meet people for a long while, so I took advantage of it.  I was there early, helping to clean our stuff out of the dining area.  The cold breakfast was served at 7:30 and the hot breakfast started at 8:30.  I got to talk to Peggy and Coy, to a man named Ronell, and to a man named George.  Peggy and Coy had just moved back to the area and were living in a hotel while they looked for a place.  They needed to get out of there soon because of the expense.

Ronell attracted my attention because he was wearing nicer clothes than most of the folks there, and he had on a headdress that looked like it could be religious in nature.  I asked and he said it was not.  He said that he was rich, very wealthy.  He also told me that his real name was Zeus, but that wasn’t the name on his government ID so he usually just told people his real name was Zeus.  He’s been hearing it in his head since he was young, apparently.

I spoke for the longest time with George.  He told me that they treat him like a king there.  He didn’t have to stand in line for the bacon and eggs, for example.  Someone brought them to him.  I was telling him about our bike trip and he asked where we were going.  I turned around to show him the map on my back, but then he said, “I can’t read.”  So another one of the riders showed him on the map where we had been and where we were going.  George had been all over the US picking tomatoes, radishes, onions, peaches…herding sheep.  He couldn’t read because he never got to go to school.  He was born in San Antonio, but he never spoke a word of English until he had to learn at age 16.  He started working in the fields at about age 6, but he couldn’t remember for sure.  I don’t know what year he referred to, but for a bunch of radishes picked you received a penny.  So you needed to pick 100 bunches of radishes to get a dollar, 1,000 bunches to get $10.

George never complained a bit.  As I said, he thought they treated him like a king there at the church.  But after talking to him, I was overwhelmed.  I went back to our room and asked someone to sit with me for a few minutes.  By the time they got there, I had tears running down my face to think of George never going to school because he was working in the fields.  He was born in the US and is a US citizen.  I have read about the plight of migrant workers, but this was the first time I had met one and heard and imagined for myself.

In the afternoon, Tom took us on an outing.  We went to the Wichita mountains wilderness area and the Holy City.  It’s supposedly a replica of the Holy City but it’s more of a stage set for the oldest continuously running Passion Play in the US.

After hanging out at the Holy City for a while, we drove up to the top of Mt. Scott and climbed around on the boulders.

July 8.

Wow!  What a long week!  This is the sixth day of riding, including 107 miles on July 4.  It was a super good idea to take some of that time and ride in the van, since it is available.  I have to admit that my daughter was right–riding this much strung together does eventually tend to wear me down!  She’s a smart one, that’s for sure!

We got an early start again, arising at 4:30.  Here is the sunrise from the bike picture:

I do well on flat days and can keep up with the front of the pack for a while.  That means there is still a party going on when I arrive at the snack station.  Sometimes there is dancing.  This time I think there were donuts!  Phil, there, in the orange shirt (!!) likes to get special treats for us and surprise us.  Sometimes donuts, sometimes ice cream, sometimes soda pop, and he always makes sure to have a plentiful supply of ice.  He rides a Cattrike, so he only rides when he can count on having an excellent, wide shoulder to ride on.

This is the trading post in Cache, OK where I learned about Quanah Parker.  Grace, our van driver and support person extraordinaire, is somehow related to Quanah Parker through her great grandmother who was a Parker.  His home is a historic site and was right behind the trading post.  He was the last chief of the Comanches (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quanah_Parker).

The other exciting incident of the day was seeing this monstrosity going down the road.  It looks kind of like a giant bomb (at least one from the movies).  It had three police escorts and wide load escorts.  We pulled all the way off the road to let it by.  It seemed a bit iffy whether it would make it over the bridge in front of us.

 

 

I’m getting to the point where it is really difficult to remember distinctive features of the landscape or of our adventures.  Every day we get up according to the time that Henry sets, rush around so we can have the site cleaned up and everything packed into the van in an hour and a half, circle up, discuss the route, have morning devotion and prayer, and then ride out to wherever our next destination is.  In fact, I forgot to mention on our first day in Texas, we had lights on at 4:30 am to try to beat the heat of the day.  It was a bit ridiculous–Circle up was at 6:00 am but the sunrise wasn’t until 6:41 (I looked it up).  It was still quite dark when we convened our circle outside.  Turned out OK, though.  It starts to get light a little before sunrise, and we all have tail lights on our bikes.  We got to see the sunrise!

On the trip from Clarendon to Hollis, two things stood out.  The first was the section of road where the shoulder had better pavement than the road!  That is the best way to make sure cyclists ride on the shoulder.  The other was coming up on the van and trailer and much of our gear lying in the road.  I came up on David first.  He was standing out in the heat waving traffic into the other lane.

We had a flat tire–more like a blowout–and it turned out that our jack was broken while trying to fix it.  A hydraulic jack doesn’t work well when the fluid leaks out.

Lucky for us, help arrived.

Other than that, there wasn’t very much variation in the day until reaching the Oklahoma border and our home for the night in Hollis, OK just beyond.

 

July 6.

The big story on the trip from Vega to Clarendon was the chance to see the Cadillac Ranch near Amarillo.  According to info from the ever-reliable internet, it is a public art installation–I had no idea of that little fact.  I thought someone just had some old cars they didn’t know what to do with!

Here’s the scoop from http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/2220

“Standing along Route 66 west of Amarillo, Texas, Cadillac Ranch was invented and built by a group of art-hippies imported from San Francisco. They called themselves The Ant Farm, and their silent partner was Amarillo billionaire Stanley Marsh 3. He wanted a piece of public art that would baffle the locals, and the hippies came up with a tribute to the evolution of the Cadillac tail fin. Ten Caddies were driven into one of Stanley Marsh 3’s fields, then half-buried, nose-down, in the dirt (supposedly at the same angle as the Great Pyramid of Giza). They faced west in a line, from the 1949 Club Sedan to the 1963 Sedan de Ville, their tail fins held high for all to see on the empty Texas panhandle.

Another photo op fatality. (Darren Collins, victim)

That was in 1974. People would stop along the highway, walk out to view the cars — then deface them or rip off pieces as souvenirs. Stanley Marsh 3 and The Ant Farm were tolerant of this public deconstruction of their art — although it doomed the tail fins — and eventually came to encourage it.

Decades have passed. The Cadillacs have now been in the ground as art longer than they were on the road as cars. They are stripped to their battered frames, splattered in day-glo paint splooge, barely recognizable as automobiles.

Yet Cadillac Ranch is more popular than ever. It’s become a ritual site for those who travel The Mother Road. The smell of spray paint hits you from a hundred yards away…”

When I was there, I was reminded of the movie, Field of Dreams:  “If you build it, they will come.”  They’re still coming to Cadillac Ranch, and we joined in the fun.

 

I also stopped in Goodnight, TX, named after Charles Goodnight.  Here is some scenery and a store that was there.  We learned from the shop keeper that he was instrumental in saving the buffalo, but PBS notes different achievements:

https://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/d_h/goodnight.htm

July 5.

Several people went to the fireworks for July 4 in Tucumcari.  We also had some guests, whom I had not previously met, but for several it was a reunion of old friends.  The West Coast Fuller Center Bike Adventure has the same staff as the East Coast Bike Adventure, so they were traveling from the end of the West Coast ride to the beginning of the East Coast ride and they arrived in Tucumcari at about dinner time.  I got to meet the people with whom I will ride for my last two weeks from Savannah down to Key West.  Richard, one of the media interns, is also a chef and wanted to prepare dinner for us.  We had a very good dinner that evening.

I promised that I would let you know about my excellent decision to rest on the Fourth!  July 5 was my best riding day ever.  It began when we all left the First Baptist Church.  I was having a little trouble with my GPS device and had to stop.  Mark said something about me taking a cupcake break, but when I got things working again, they weren’t far ahead and were still in town.  So I rode hard and passed them!  It was super fun!  And then I was able to ride with the lead group for at least ten miles.  I lost them when a couple people decided to race against the media car, creating a big gap between me and the group.  After that I fell further and further behind.  But it was still my best day riding of the trip so far.  We are getting into flatter territory (hill-climbing is not my strength, as I have said before.  I’m getting  better, but it’s still my weak point.)  We also had a tail wind in the morning!  It was a great start to the day.  I got to the first rest stop while there was still a party going on!

We had help from the Coast ride support team for the rest stops, so the media team had a car all to themselves to take photos and videos and run ahead to special locations.  That also made a good day to be in the lead, because they take more photos and videos of them.  I heard Maddie say once that if you took every person at the same location, a video will get pretty boring—it all looks the same.

We crossed the Texas border during the day.  At that time we were on the interstate.  Much of the day we were on old Route 66.  Some of it is in great condition and some of it is terrible!  One of the highlights was in Adrian, TX which is the midway point of Route 66—halfway between Chicago and Los Angeles!  The cafe there didn’t have sandwiches, but they had great pie and good coffee.  I got myself a souvenir mug which I had shipped to my mom’s house.

As the day wore on, it got hotter.  The tar on the road was bubbly.  I got about a 1/4 inch coating of tar on my tires, and then we went through chip and seal which wasn’t fully sealed.  I picked up a ton of tiny rocks on my tires.  Not the greatest finish to the day, but we all made it to Vega safely.

Richard, with the help of the dinner team, made an excellent meal for us.  Then the Coastal group headed out around 8 pm to continue toward their Maine destination.

July 4

Henry asked us all to get decked out for Independence Day.  I wore a stars and strip bandanna, but I don’t like to wear love of country on my sleeve much more than I want to wear my faith on my sleeve.  I guess I wonder what assumptions people will make and would rather have these things come out in conversation than in choice of clothing.  A couple of people got special stars and stripes socks and Meredith bought temporary tattoos that everyone could apply.  We got up at 4:30 am to celebrate the 4th by riding 107 miles to Tucumcari, NM.  Steve, though, topped everyone with his patriotic gear.  He had gone down to the local festival in Las Vegas and seen a wind sock at a booth.  He asked how much they wanted for it.  I don’t think it was really for sale, but they sold it to him.  When he told them what it was for, they sold it for $5, and decided he needed a flag on top of that.  So he wore a flag across his shoulders and tied the twirling wind sock to his helmet!

I was pretty worn out.  I got dressed in my riding clothes in case I changed my mind, but I decided to take the day off.  This turned out to be an excellent decision, which you will hear about tomorrow!  So I got to ride with the support team and help set up the snacks for the riders when they came through.

At the third rest stop (there were four for the day) we were at the top of a very steep hill, so we got to cheer the riders on as they came up the hill.  Judy was one of the last to arrive and I had heard someone talking about the Tour de France and people running alongside the riders flying the flag.  So I decided to go halfway down the mountain and run up with Judy!  One of the other riders was really moved by it.  I wasn’t sure if Judy was until she said so a few days later.

I also saw some cactus and even a blooming cactus by the side of the road.  This is actually one advantage to not having rest rooms!  You notice things by the side of the road that you wouldn’t otherwise notice!