Friday, June 4, 2010

Lostgator Century

Staying the night in Lake McClellan we woke at sunrise to a great view. The sun brightened the whole valley and it looked like we camped in a canyon. Because we coasted at 31 mph entering the camp site, it took us 25 minutes to get back to the highway and down the road.

Our first mark was Shamrock just 40 miles down the road which we reached before 9am. This was going to be our camp site today but we decided to trek on to Elk City in Oklahoma.

Shamrock is this little town that consists of just one road. It wouldn't exist unless Route 66 was there as an attraction. One place we had to see, strangely enough, was the Conoco gas station on the corner of the town. This station was the one that the cartoon movie Cars based their station around. It looks exactly like it and the people there were a bunch of characters too.

Leaving there, we moved on to the boarder and took some rest in a town called Texola where we found out just how far we'd been going today. The terrain was flat but we still had the headwind and highway 40 was our only option. Out here, the county roads run east and west while the Farm to Market roads run north and south. Using these for a while, we burned up our legs, serpentining around 40. We then crossed the grass divider and road on what turned out to be a great shoulder. Thank you Texas and Oklahoma for maintaining the roads better than New Mexico and Arizona!

We pushed on, switching off who was pulling every 15 minutes so we had fresh legs in front. After 6 hours and 56 minutes, we reached Elk City for a total of 108 miles riding today. Major races are held for light weight road bikes to ride 100 miles and we managed to ride 108 with 80 lb bikes, pretty productive day!

Reaching the KOA, we quickly unloaded the bikes, put up the tents, jumped in the pool, and ordered the biggest meals we could find at the RV park. Normal riding for this distance and pace, we probably burned close to 4,000 calories on-top of the usual 2,000 calories needed everyday. Food has turned into this tool to ride rather than a leisure activity. We've been reading the back of packages and stocking up on high calorie food but it's becoming close to impossible to take in 6,000 calories while riding for hours, we're trying tho.

With a stop in Weatherford tomorrow, we'll hit Oklahoma City on Saturday then Tulsa two days after that. The miles are coming easier and the country is flying past us but we're loving it the whole way!

Below is the camp site this morning, the Conoco station and us crossing the Oklahoma boarder doing the Snoopy dance in celebration.

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