Now the fun stuff-

We actually attacked the eastern portions of TN, AR, & MS during long weekends, as we could not take a 3 week long hiatus from home and work to ride it all in one fluid trip. This story focuses on our longest leg to date…a week of riding from Oklahoma to near the Nevada line.

We packed the bikes into trucks to expedite our westward progress, and left the comfort of Georgia for the wilds of Oklahoma. Twenty short hours later, we sat in Buffalo, OK ready to begin our adventure. Adrenaline would not let us be weary from the truck ride out, and we mounted up, leaving our trucks at the local Police station for safekeeping; something all 3 residents of Buffalo didn’t seem to mind.

Oklahoma was fast, flat…and, well flat! It was a great first leg that allowed us to eat up 250 miles of groomed dirt road and sandy washouts in relative ease. We worked out our jitters as we followed Tim, guided by the route he painstakingly plotted into his Garmin Rino GPS. As a native of Florida, and a transplant to Georgia, I was taken aback at the simple beauty of acres upon acres of nothing, interrupted only by the occasional natural gas well and hundreds of head of cattle; neither of which seemed to be bothered by our super legal forward progress.

We charged westward without seeing blacktop or another vehicle for a hundred or more miles. We stopped occasionally to take a rest, and snap a few photos. One such stop introduced us to a rancher that happened to be passing by in his pickup, and was “wondrin’ what those scooters is doin’ way out here?”

We explained our journey, and chatted briefly as he warned us that there were free range cattle from here until Colorado. We amiably parted, and he again warned us that, “the cattle ain’t mean, but if they is in the road they ain’t movin’…and I reckon the scooter’d lose that battle.” Good advice indeed.

We set our sights on New Mexico for the night, but were sidetracked by the hope for a good night’s sleep and a warm shower. Some of the locals at the gas station recommended a state park on the western side of Oklahoma that we could make it to before dark. We had a brief discussion, but were seduced by the idea of setting up camp and leaving our seats for the evening; so we set off for our first camp of the trip.

Setting up and breaking camp was a ritual we would become ruthlessly efficient at by the end of the week. However, I was always amazed at how difficult it was to get everything packed back up again the same as it was the day before. So, with camp broken, and bungee cords strewn in all directions (holding all of the camping kit chaotically to the luggage rack like some strange S&M fantasy) we set off making forward progress to New Mexico.