Day 5

Day 5

Newkirk, Ok - Kiowa, Ks - somewhere southwest of Liberal, Ks

Yep, it finally flattened out.

Stopped on the side of the road to  eat lunch.

Recess.

Loading up after lunch.

The only stop sign we saw through Oklahoma. Normally you come up on intersections and you look both ways for dust coming up from behind a car and then blow through the intersection. All this is done at about 55mph on gravel. I'm not sure you could stop if you saw a car coming or not.

Traffic. Three of these harvesters passed us. Note the telephone pole on the right side of the photo. That's how far off the road I had to park to allow them to pass.They didn't slow down a bit either.

Kiowa, Kansas for gas. Not much else there.

And then back at it.

Driving the border of Oklahoma and Kansas.

Thankfully this is the only snake we've seen so far. 

Me explaining something very deep and important. Probably about cowboys...

Meanwhile, in the background the kids begin excavation of the cowboy cemetery.

We practice cutting and roping... from the car.

Sway-backed old barn that I though was really cool.

Cimarron River, next stop Cimarron National Grasslands.

The only nap he has taken so far.

Low sandhills in the Cimarron Grasslands.

Too windy for the tent even facing into the wind. We had to pack it up because no one was able to sleep. So we pulled out option 2. Everyone on the sleep platform in the truck. Except for me. I slept in the sand for most of the night and then graduated to the tailgate for the wee morning hours.

Sunset sleeping arrangements.

Larkin waking up on the morning of Day 6.

At the beach. Wait, that's not right.

breakfast.

 The national grassland.

 Roads start turning sandy.

 In the middle of no-where. Jackrabbits and buzzards our only company.

 Advantages of driving late into the day: cool photos. That's about it.

This is where we ended up camping after pushing late into the evening. Later than we had so far.

 Day 5 stats. You can tell we were on pavement at some point to hit a top speed in the 70's. A long and fairly fast day - especially since we were on gravel 90 percent of the time. Truth is, we can average about as fast on flat gravel as we can on the pavement.