Where the Wind Comes Sweepin Down the Plain

We got to the Oklahoma City KOA after a long, 466 mile day from Memphis, with a stop for lunch at an Arkansas state park near Fort Smith.  Unfortunately, we developed a problem with our propane tank there, and we've had to shut it off.  So no stove or hot water, except what we can heat in the microwave.  We'll try to get it fixed in San Diego.

I have a low tolerance for equipment malfunctions -- especially brand new equipment.  Thinking about the relative complexity of the vehicle systems in the Enterprise, as opposed to the camper systems, only increased my irritation.  For example, there are probably over 20 different computers in our Mercedes turbodiesel, not to mention a vast array of superbly engineered mechanical components, all of which have performed flawlessly, while a simple propane system has malfunctioned.  Go figure.

Dinner in Oklahoma City was at the fabled Cattlemen's Cafe, which we'd heard about from our daughter Katie, as well as from roadfood.com -- an invaluable resource for cross-country travelers.  We both ordered the T-bone, which was excellent, but of course in classical American tradition the portion was enormous.  We ate part of it and had the rest in Amarillo the next day for lunch.  Unfortunately, it wasn't only the portions that were enormous.  The majority of the diners seemed to be equally oversized.  There was a group of extremely obese people at a nearby table, and I found myself wondering if the floor joists had been sized for such a concentrated load.

This reminded me of a wedding I had attended not so long before.  The couple and most of the guests were twenty-somethings, but I was dismayed to see how many of those twenty-somethings were obese.  Shortly after that event, I had occasion to watch a documentary about Woodstock which used a lot of footage actually shot at the event.  In 1969, among all the hundreds of twenty-somethings shown in the movie, I didn't see a single obese person.  Not one.  We've come a long way since then, and in a very unfortunate direction.

The next day was even longer, as Interstate 40 joined the old Route 66  and we made our way across the remaining half of Oklahoma, the entire Texas panhandle (see the previous post), and half of New Mexico, arriving at Midge and John's adobe palace late in the day. They have a large adobe house up on a hill on the outskirts of Albuquerque with a great view of Sandia Peak and most of the valley, shown above.  They also have two standard poodles, and Midge is allergic to non-poodle dogs, so Jake had to hang out in the Enterprise for the duration of our two-day stay.  We were originally planning to just stay overnight, but John is a first-class wine pourer, so after staggering off to bed, we awoke the next morning somewhat under the weather and decided to have a day of rest.  And it was sunday, after all.