Home, James II
Thursday May 16, 2019
Kitty has volunteered for some long hard riding, more than I'd ever schedule for any of our two-up trips. She's committed to ride 500+ mile days the rest of the trip home. Understand I wouldn't ask her to do this, which is why I was willing to give up seeing Monument Valley.
"It was worth it," she said yesterday.
Arkansas conveniently offers 3 options: 450, 500, and 540 miles, the longest being Russellville, AR. I route for now to the middle destination and we strike out eastward from Amarillo TX.
I admit I haven't been in every flat place in the US, but among the places I've been, the western plains in the Texas Panhandle are the flattest I've ever encountered. It's called "Llano Estacado" or Staked Plain and runs in a wide swath from Amarillo south to Odessa. It is so flat we can see the curvature of the earth, similar to the ocean at the beach. There are no trees or hills to break the landscape. Vast expanses of flat farmland, all apparently tillable for crops or grazing for cattle.
And then it ends abruptly, with canyons and escarpments carved by rivers at the eastern edge of the plain, and suddenly we have rolling plains with more vegetation. Still flat, but not the table-top flatness of the western section. Palo Duro Canyon along this demarcation may be the most famous of the canyons.
The rolling plains gives way to Oklahoma red earth which in turn becomes more wooded and gives way to the wooded slopes of the Ouachita Mountains in Arkansas.
At one of our breaks where I also fuel just because I can, Kitty decides we're good for the 540-mile destination so I route to Russellville, AR, and addition of about 40 miles to the original destination.
It's more humid today than yesterday, and by late afternoon I realize I'm behind on water intake, feeling a little rocky. In the TMI department, urine color is a good gauge of hydration. If it's not nearly clear, you're behind on water. Mark it down.
Over the years, Kitty has developed a really excellent hydration strategy. Our trailer has a cooler, and inside this we put a smaller ice chest. In the hotel at night, Kitty packs water bottles with ice. By morning the ice is mostly melted and the water is ice-cold. She repacks the chest with ice, puts it back in the trailer cooler, and we have ice-cold water all day, wherever we go, no matter what the temperature. Even if we deplete the water supplies, we then have the melted ice to drink.
So I sit inside and slowly sip a bottle of ice-cold water from the trailer. I immediately feel rejuventated. Back on the road for the last 90-mile segment, I tell Kitty "I feel like a wilted flower after it gets a drink - all its foliage perks up, its arms lift, and it feels alive again!" It's like a new lease on life.
We finish out in Russellville, AR at a couple miles under 550 miles.
I wear LD Comfort underwear and socks; I carry only two sets with me, which means most nights I'm hand-washing something with baby shampoo. I use this because it's gentle and doesn't cause irritation should some shampoo be left in the garment due to incomplete hand rinsing. These things take a long time to dry, so to make sure I have dry clothes by morning, I often grab the ironing board and couple hangars and hang the stuff from the ironing board, placing it next to the air conditioning fan. It works. Don't judge me.
Home is 1056 miles away. Kitty wants to do it in two days. I would never ask her to ride like this, and we do have Sunday as a fall-back if we don't make it in two days. But tomorrow, again, we'll start out expecting ride about 530 miles.
Right now, it's hard to imagine that two days ago were enthralled with the scenery in Monument Valley. We traveled 5,185 miles so far on this trip.
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| Ironing board drying technique |
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| SpotWalla track for day |
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| SpotWalla track for trip |
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