Tuesday 6/15
Low 68, high 97 and very few clouds
Really nice here, but too crowded. In the fall or spring when school is in session, during normal years not like last year, it could be magnificent. So many birds! I wasted ten minutes yesterday watching a robin because he was singing so differently from the normal robin song that I thought he must be a different bird. But no.
But there's orioles, of some sort, or so I have to assume. They sure sounded like orioles. In the tree that shades our picnic table. Ed saw a pair chase each other away and he said they were little yellow birds. So I don't know. Yet. Going outside to see now.
Around noon we went swimming, or rather, Ed did some swimming while I just lazied around on the floatie, trying to see fish under the water. I never did see one, other than the one I saw the day before from the edge.
Before that I went for a jog on the heart-healthy trail. It may have been "heart" healthy, but it was ankle-breaking cruel. Clearly it had been mowed, recently, but the ground was tussocky and very uneven.
I hit the .25 mile marker, then the .5. And then the trail split without any kind of sign saying which way, so I went to the right. Soon I was at the sign for the .25 marker for the other direction, and it was only a little ways after that before I reached the beginning sign for the other end. The other end was at a campground, which was a fine-looking place and only had a few occupants, but it didn't have the water view or lake access of ours. It would have been a good place for an overnighter. Such as one to stop at on our way to Colorado....
I didn't linger. There was very little shade on the trail and I didn't have any water for Molly, so we turned back there. I amused myself by timing the span between the .25 marker for the other end and the .5 marker for my end--about one minute. If that had been real, I'd have been jogging a 4-minute mile!
I supposed that if I'd gone left at the split, I'd have ended up with a nicely executed, two mile jog. But no matter--what we did was plenty enough for the both of us.
Later. I find it amusing when I can take trip notes in almost real time. Like we're only doing things so I can come back and write about them. It's a sign of a really boring trip, I guess.
I planned it so we'd get to the Route 66 Historical Museum with one hour to tour the exhibits before the restaurant opening time of five o'clock. But when we arrived at the museum, shortly after four, the ladies at the desk refused to sell us tickets for entry to the majority of the buildings--only the two main ones. They insisted that the full tour took one and one-half hours so we didn't have time to do it.
So we paid our three dollars apiece and walked through the two main buildings. It would normally have taken about ten minutes, but I dawdled and drug it out to fifteen. And that was it. We had almost an hour to kill before the restaurant opened. In historic downtown Elk City. Whoopee.
After seeing the rather lame exhibits for route 66, I'm kind of glad we didn't pay the full price to see the other buildings. They'd have been the same old junk we see everywhere--the contents of Grandma's attic spread around without even a few tedious, uninteresting placards. I swear, I could have done a better job.
Prairiefire Grill in Elk City--excellent. Oddly enough, I don't think I'd eat there again. But I highly recommend it to anyone traveling by on Interstate 40 at dinnertime or lunch time. Just for a change, I had decided I'd try to pretend I didn't know what amount of animal cruelty goes into commercial pork and that I would order their signature dish--sausage-stuffed, hand made corn dogs with spicy Sriracha dipping sauce. But they weren't on the menu that night!
Instead I had a salmon salad--no doubt it was farmed Atlantic salmon from a pollution factory in the ocean--but it was excellent. On greens with blueberries and sugary toasted pecans. And some very good sweet potato fries--good, but not as good at those at The Old Plantation. Still, a very, very good meal. I wish I'd remembered to see if they had a non-alcoholic ginger beer.
We were done and back by six-thirty, but the dogs thought it was way too late. Still, it was too hot for much of a walk--with the sun still blazing down and near one hundred degrees. They got a quickie and a promise, and we took a long walk later, after the sun started to go down. It vanished into a cloud bank, thankfully. But those were pretty much the only clouds we'd seen all day.
After picking off my third tick of day, I got curious and checked Molly. In spite of the extremely overpriced flea, tick and heartworm medicine she gets, she had one behind her ear. I had to hope it was going to die soon. After getting into bed, I felt and removed another tick on myself. buggy, I was beginning to get a little antsy about all the bugs. In addition to ticks, there were a lot of flies, and a plethora of minuscule winged bugs in the Mammoth-mobile. They were smaller and fruit flies and they didn't seem to bite, but every time I felt one on me, I thought it might be a tick!
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