Marion, IL to Yukon, OK

We stayed in the Hampton Inn in Marion, IL, last night, and implemented our travel plan, i.e., getting on the road by 7 am so we can drive in the light. Driving at night in new places is neither fun nor educational. Unfortunately, it being the Sunday after Thanksgiving, many others were plundering the breakfast buffet at 6.15. Perhaps the plan will work better tomorrow. We did get on the road at 7, however, and made 629 miles in about 10-1/2 hours.

As we crossed the Mississippi at St. Louis, we both remarked that it is smaller there than the Patuxent River near our Maryland place. Out of St. Louis, we were on I-44, which largely parallels Route 66 of song and tv fame. We enjoyed the signs noting where Historic Route 66 crossed and paralleled 66. We actually drove a little bit on 66 when we got off for gasoline.

Southern Missouri was hilly, covered with trees, well endowed with rocky outcroppings and cliffs. It is in the northern Ozarks and quite pretty. The multiple browns and leafless forests revealed the details of the landscape. It was cloudy and rainy, but still good to look at.

We saw many signs/billboards advertising vineyards. Jane recalled reading that at some point in the past, Missouri was the leading wine producing state in the country. We saw St. James Winery
www.StJamesWinery.com
And Meramec Vineyards
www.MeramecVineyards.com
The vineyards were right along I-44 and quite extensive. Some wineries had those nice, modern, woody tasting buildings. For more on Missouri wines, see http://www.missouriwine.org/

We also saw, for several hundred miles, billboards advertising tours of the world’s or the country’s largest barrel maker. Cartoon characters on the billboards (what ever happened to regulations limiting billboards on Interstates?) made it seem quite jolly to take such a tour. I figured that if you’re going to make barrels anyway—presumably for the wineries—why not see if you could get people to pay you to see you do it? Possibly applicable to any number of activities, I guess . . . .

Oklahoma was not at all what I had imagined. It is rolling countryside with lots of cattle and neat (not always) ranches spread prettily about. Many trees are sprinkled liberally across the brown fields, some in groves, others individuals. The land is parklike, many fields covered with now-brown grass and no undergrowth. One theory we concocted is that the cattle eat the underbrush. Whatever the fact, these ranches look like well-tended golf courses. The browns of the grasses on the fields are varied, from winter wheat and winter Bermuda such as we are used to, to intense, darker browns, one of which Jane called burnt orange. Some areas, particularly west of Tulsa, are more heavily forested, with undergrowth intact, and with many streams. Occasionally there are flat-floored, shallow valleys covered with either brown grasses or some emerald green vegetation.

We saw a beautiful sunset over Oklahoma City. We are staying in Yukon, hometown of Garth Brooks, in a Hampton Inn just off Garth Brooks Blvd.!!! Yukon is just west of Oklahoma City.

We had a very nice Italian meal at Primo’s, just across the parking lot from our hotel.

Two other observations: we had much more traffic than one would expect in this part of the world, except that it is the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and so lots of traffic is to be expected. I-44 in Oklahoma is a toll road and they are not used to handling the crowds that arrived today at their toll booths. Thankfully the speed limit is 75, so we made decent time.

And finally, it was very windy today, with temperatures in the low 70s. The car was buffeted most of the day. And there was much dust in the air.

We took some pictures from the window of our car; I’ll put some up one of these days.