Leaving Oklahoma City

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Oklahoma City is  pretty view from a distance, but up close it’s fishing from a bridge, run-down motels, and gas for $1.99.  They don’t try to keep smog out of the air because the incessant wind blows it all to California. 

You can buy this large 3 bedroom house on  55 acres near Oklahoma City for  $465,000 or you can buy a nice condominium in Pasadena for the same price, and pay $3.00 for gas. 

I said good bye to the Joad family in John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath”  as I left the city. They joined Route 66 here on 23^rd Street   

 “The family on top of the truck, stared about at the stores, at the big houses, at the office buildings.  And then the buildings grew smaller and the stores smaller. . . Its bigness and its strangeness frightened them with the fine-clothed people they saw.  They did not speak of it to each other—later they would, but not now.  They saw the oil derricks in town, on the edge of town; oil derricks black, and the smell of oil and gas in the air.  But they didn’t exclaim.  It was so big and so strange it frightened them.”  

It was good to leave the big city and get into the green humid countryside of middle Oklahoma.  An old gas station with its crafted local stones must have been a welcome stop in the 1930’s,  and an ultra-modern gas station might someday be looked on with antique eyes in another century.  

Old Route 66 much as it was in the 1940’s.  Once it carried thousands of cross-country travelers,  now used by a few locals to get to their farms.

In 1889 this land was opened for homesteading, and a great land rush followed.  This round barn near the boom town of  Arcadia was built in1898, before Oklahoma was a state. The farmer who  built it knew about tornadoes and figured a round barn could withstand them.  Apparently he was right. Most of the original barns aren’t here anymore.

Boomerang Diner

Chandler

I rode into Chandler yesterday afternoon, tired after a roller-coaster ride in the green hills of Oklahoma. In the little Boomerang Diner, old-timers sat at a long table talking polite in their drawls, like clones of an ancient homesteader who probably didn’t build a round barn.

It was good to check into the Lincoln Motel.  The forecast was for thunderstorms today, so I decided not to dare the devil, which might carry those little twirly things inside its thunder.  I’m  sitting here at noon in this comfortable room, writing to you and watching the rain.

Michael Angerman is continuing a map of my journey as he did on the first section when I arrived in Oklahoma on May 18 this year. Find it at:  Google Map Link for my ride from Pasadena to Chicago When you first open the map, zoom out to see the overall picture, then zoom in to any section