Adventures Of Bill & Chrissy

Here's a couple of pictures of our site in Clinton.

As you can see a satellite dish would have been frustrating. That's why we've switched to streaming everything. No off the air nor satellite anymore. Many campgrounds have cable TV, but there's really nothing on cable we like to watch, plus streaming lets us watch what we want, when we watch. Back home in Vail, I do have a tv antenna to watch local news.

We weren't very long before we got into Texas.

Lots of wind farms and lots of cattle feed lots with beef factories near by.

There's a restaurant that offers a free 72 ounce steak for free, if you can eat it all within 3 hours I think. If you can't finish, you pay.
I've watched videos and it's a monster steak but some people can actually do it!

Some of you may know about the Cadillac ranch where there are about 20 Cadillacs buried nose first into the sand. We visited it a few years back. Now this place has a Volkswagen ranch. We didn't stop because there was no good place for the rig, but Chrissy took pics.

So since we were just skimming the panhandle we were into New Mexico pretty quickly.

Texico New Mexico...
Prices on diesel are getting better, still not the $1.68 of the Trump era but much better than the $6.00 covid era. I'm getting 6.5 mpg now rather than the 6.3 going to Maine. It's because it's downhill right?

I'd love to tell you more about Fauci, but Chrissy says this is a travel blog.
You really need to get the book. It's worse than I could have imagined, much worse.

Chrissy found us a very nice little park for 30 bucks a night with a pull through space 45 x 90 feet, blazing wifi, and full hookups.

We're only one block away from the Billy the Kid museum which was closed by the time we got here, but we plan on visiting it on Monday.
Church and football tomorrow. Nice quiet weekend. We're only 8 hours from home but we're not in a rush.
We're in the "Wind Down" period I guess. That point where you don't really want to go home yet, but you really don't want to drive anymore either. RVing is a completely different lifestyle, with lots of freedoms and new things to see. Yet home is, well, home.

Here we are at the Clinton KOA in Elk City / Clinton OK. Bad roads and it was very windy, so that made travel not much fun today, but we're here! Still very hot though. Lucky we weren't doing I10 down south, they're getting hammered with rain! We went from 44 into 40 and will stay on that for a while before heading south down to into I10.

Tulsa

I was thinking about the EPA and Brutus. Prior to this shovel, they used to dig down into the earth and haul the coal out with under ground mines. But Brutus cleaned off the overburden so they could extract that coal from above ground. Great idea, but that meant a huge channel of earth being removed equal to a highway 400 miles long in this little area. So, the damage to the environment was really bad, to wildlife etc. So I get it.

We're about 5 hours into the 26 hour book about Fauci. It's almost unbelievable, almost. Now that he and Gates have been exposed, I hope they will be held accountable.

Nice little campground here. Another older site but the people are really nice. I asked if I could wash the coach, it hasn't been done yet since Maine, and they said, why not? So I got 'er done. The rear cap was all greasy from that oil leak. It looks so much better now. I think we might get into New Mexico tomorrow before settling in for the weekend.

We were able to watch our grandson Parker play football on TV tonight in Windham Maine. Pretty cool.
Their high school televises it and we were able to login. Great internet here. Thank goodness because we're under a bunch of trees, making any satellite system worthless.

Miami Oklahoma is the home of the Newell factory, makers of a top end coach. Since we were here, we went to visit. Quite the place, and some very beautiful coaches. They start at $2.7 million, so they ought to be very nice...

That looks like a plain counter but is actually a stove top. Amazing.

Then we headed to Kansas, just a little ways north, to see Brutus, the largest electric shovel in the world. What a monster. It's very very difficult to show you how large this thing is in pictures. This map shows where the coal is located in the United States. Brutus was delivered on 150 railroad cars, took a year to assemble, stands 160 feet tall and weighs 11 million pounds. It operated from 1963 to 1974 when the EPA shut it down. It ran off electricity that was delivered by a cable from a substation 2 miles away. It cost $6.5 million. It had 15,000 horse power with multiple electric motors.

The bucket is 92 cubic yards and held 150 tons of overburden. One scoop could fill 3 railroad cars. They only removed overburden with this shovel. It never dug any coal. It could dig 69 feet down.

Then we had a wonderful supper at the Downstream Casino and Resort. I haven't had a properly cooked steak in a long time.

French onion soup made with 5 different kinds of onions. Yum. All their beef is raised by the casino, all vegetables raised on their own farms and non GMO. Just fantastic. We wish we lived closer to this place! They gave us free desert since it was our first time there.... Can't beat that.

Tomorrow we head more west, but not out of Oklahoma I don't think. Baltimore against Kansas City tonight in the NFL opener. YEAH!