Nada

I’m shamelessly borrowing a song title from my favorite album of all time - Fizzy Fuzzy Big and Buzzy by the Refreshments, circa 1995 - even though the song itself has nothing to do with today’s ride. Just the title. It is an accurate description of what we saw today. In 55 miles from El Reno to Weatherford, we passed through a town. Yep. One. I am not counting Bridgeport, Oklahoma, the self-anointed crossroads of America. It was two houses and a campground. Their big sign led us to believe there was more, but there was not. This Is not to suggest that the day itself was a total bore, just the view. Fortunately, I had some prior experience and am mentally prepared.

The route for the first half of the day - until we got to the town of Hinton - was the result of Route 66 being closed. Just yesterday, they began a bridge repair over the Canadian River. Going that way would have resulted in a very long detour, at least in bike riding terms, and would have taken us north. We have quickly learned that north is the one direction you definitely don’t want to go around here. While the wind yesterday was from the northwest, today it was from the northeast making for much more pleasant conditions. On top of that, the roads we ended up on had virtually no traffic. Without the fierce wind and traffic, we could ride side by side and carry on a wide ranging conversation. Borrowing on yesterday’s discussion of expected versus unexpected:

Expected - 5.5 miles of gravel road. While I didn’t actually expect that on a Route 66 ride, the fact that we found gravel roads in rural Oklahoma was not a shock.

Unexpected - 2900’ of elevation gain, including 3 first gear climbs on the gravel. The morning was fairly relentless rolling hills. Once we got to the gravel, we couldn’t really enjoy the downhills because of the inherent health risks. That meant we hit the uphills with no momentum. Our tires were slipping on the loose gravel so the only way to the top was to

get into granny gear.

It turns out that not only did the bridge construction start on Route 66 yesterday, but BB’s Bistro opened its doors in Hinton yesterday as well. That was very fortunate for us, as it was the only restaurant in the only town. The staff was very friendly and accommodating, even if they hadn’t memorized the menu or actually been trained on how to be a server.

In the afternoon, we rejoined Route 66 and had a leisurely, mostly flat ride into Weatherford.

This sounded delicious and we had the chance to observe many of the cows that will soon be making that journey.

One of the gravel uphills. You can see the not-so-straight line I was taking trying to find something that had been compacted. I was mostly unsuccessful.