The MisterEd 8000; Grande Tour of America

No pictures today.

OK, today was just plain hot, humid, uncomfortable and nasty.  I wasn't stupid enough to think I wasn't going to experience heat in the south in August, but the whole middle section of the nation, from the Gulf all the way to Canada, was still in the grip of a record heat wave.  Today's peak temps reached 108 and the humidity was just plain brutal.  It was damp when I left Weatherford and it just got damper and hotter all day long.  At each gas stop, I was buying two bottles of water - one to drink and one to pour over me.  The only problem was that it was so humid that the water I poured over my shirt and inside my jacket never evaporated, so all I succeeded in doing was making myself even wetter and hotter than I would have been if I hadn't soaked.

Thus, today's ride was a relaxed affair with LOTS of breaks and stops to get inside air conditioned buildings.  It was the second shortest day of the trip simply because of the heat.  Even though it was sort of a rotten day due to the weather, I still had a great day.  The road was dry, the air was clear, the visibility unlimited and some of the roads were fantastic.  If it had been twenty degrees cooler, it would have been an epic day.

The route today takes me from Weatherford east on I-40 through Oklahoma City and then on to US177 through Tecumsa and on to US270 through Seminole.  As I head out through these towns in eastern Oklahoma, I start noticing something about almost every main street - they're all boarded up.  The towns weren't full ghost towns, but whole sections of the main drag through several of them had entire blocks that had not one operating business, not a single occupied building.  All the towns were active - there were gas stations and stores and people around, but the towns certainly had the appearance that their time had gone by some years before.

It wasn't until I started to get out into the low rolling hills near the Arkansas border that I started seeing what explains the state of the towns on the road before.  Oil fields.  Lots of oil fields.  But oil fields without a single pump running.  Dormant and dead oil fields.  Now I understood.  Eastern Oklahoma used to have a vibrant oil industry at some point.  Now the sleeping towns and villages along US270 were the only testament left to those times.

As the day wore on and I started noticing that I was being affected by the heat, it became time to admit I wasn't going much farther today.  When even the locals question your sanity about being outside without air conditioning in this weather, you have to wonder if you're being real smart.  I was getting punchy enough that I was starting to make bad and somewhat unsafe decisions.  When that starts to happen, it's time to quit for the day.

I enjoyed some really nice twisty roads in the western Arkansas hills and while watching some ugly thunder clouds gather ahead of me, decided that Hot Springs would be a good place to settle in for the night.  Twenty minutes after checking in to a motel in town, the sky opened up with torrential rain, small hail, 15 or 20 lightning strikes a minute and heavy winds.  I was certainly glad I had stopped.

I began the day in the boyhood home of an astronaut and ended it in the boyhood home of a President.

Sleep came easily this night with the Weather Channel on the TV.

A few links