Lubbock wasn't intended as a day off, but as I had to hitchhike in, it effectively was. I was lucky enough to have excellent WarmShowers hosts, Peter and Laurie, a couple who was both down to earth and perhaps a little quirky as well. They had three teenage boys living in the house with them, not that I minded much. We spent the evening drinking beer, eating pot roast, and watching My Little Pony.

On my way out of Lubbock, I rode through the Texas Tech campus, a pretty one, and one of the very largest, by campus area, in the country. A few universities claim to be much larger, but only make that claim by including large non-contiguous areas which aren’t part of the campus. That’s not campus size, that’s land owned by the university. There’s a difference.

I like Texas Tech, and I very nearly went there instead of the University of Texas. I sometimes wonder how things would’ve gone if I'd gone there. A lot more of my high school friends went there; would we have remained friends in college? Would I have completed a degree in electric engineering, or would I still have switched majors? Would I have stayed in band all four years? Would music still be a big part of my life? Would I have gotten into distance running, or bike touring, or backpacking?

A lot of these things could’ve gone differently, and in some ways, you might say I’d be a very different person today. But on a true, fundamental level, would I be all that different? I think no. A different job and different hobbies don’t necessarily make you an entirely different person.

Just because things could've been different doesn't mean they would've been better.

As fate would have it, the following week, Texas Tech was playing The University of Texas for the softball national championship. On my way out of town, I saw a sign which read:

“Where TF is Lubbock?
In the national championship!”

Tech has always relished its role as an underdog.

Riding out of Lubbock, there was a strong tailwind early in the day. That and a pair of fresh legs had me flying on the dirt roads. Before noon, I'd already logged 100 km, despite moving slow in the early going while navigating the streets of Lubbock.

In early afternoon, the wind decided to change direction and go ballistic. I can never win. Nine days in, and I still haven't had a single day with no headwind, start-to-finish. But the day ended at a scenic destination, and the Caprock Canyon Trailway turned out to be some of the best miles in Texas, though several miles of the trail surface need a lot of maintenance.

After Caprock Canyon, the Great Plains Route went 50 miles out of the way to visit some ranch I'd never heard of. The surface was far too soft and sandy; even Teeder could barely move. I have no idea how anyone’s supposed to do this on a gravel bike, with tires less than half the width of Teeder’s, and it’d be impossible after a rain. Three miles in, I turned around and backtracked to the highway.

I don’t mind taking a quiet paved county road here and there, but the designers of the route will do the stupidest thing, seemingly just to say they did it on gravel. The route is frequently shaped like a staircase when a simple L shape will do.

As a result, each day has 20+ turns, and you have to spend the entire day glued to your phone, repeatedly checking to make sure you didn’t miss a turn on an unmarked gravel road. That means every five minutes, you have to:

• Shift down

• Hit the brakes

• Unclip

• Set a foot down

• Unzip the frame bag

• Pull out the phone

• Unlock the phone

• Type in the PIN because the screen doesn't recognize your dirty fingerprint

• Select the map app

• Zoom in

• Verify that it’s not this dirt road, it’s the next one

• Turn the screen off

• Put the phone back in the frame bag

• Zip up the frame bag

• Push off

• Clip in

• Shift back up

Five minutes later, you have to do it ALL over again, only this time it’s the road you turn on. And another five minutes later, you do it again. And again. And again, all day long.

Not having to stay on a device all day is one of the primary reasons I go touring in the first place. Having to stress out about getting lost and nervously check your phone all day is the opposite of fun. It’s much more enjoyable when you can get on one road and simply pedal for an hour or two. The creators of this route don’t appear to understand that the simplest solution is often the best one.

It kept raining for the better part of a week, sometimes pretty hard, turning many dirt roads into slop. As a result, I frequently stuck to pavement in Oklahoma.

Aside from driving through, I’d only been to Oklahoma once before, on a memorable trip to Camp Classen. In Plano ISD (where I grew up), the entire 5th grade of each school spent a school week (Mon-Fri) at a camp in Oklahoma, where we went on nature hikes by day and slept in cabins at night. The experience was highly educational; I still remember learning specific things about how faults work, what soil is made of, which birds can see better than others and why, and so on.

Each day also had some amount of free time built in, during which you could choose between canoeing, swimming, shooting hoops, or basically a large outdoor recess. For many young Plano-ites, it was one of our favorite memories of our 13 years of school, so naturally, the district decided it was no longer worth the cost. Most of us have forgotten the majority of what we learned in 5th grade, but no one forgot Camp Classen.

It began raining hard just as I made it into Elk City, OK, and it would only get worse from there. I went straight to the fire station and asked if they knew a friendly church which would take me in, and within minutes, I was staying with them.

Fire stations are some of the best arrangements you’ll ever have. For one thing, it’s about the safest place you can be. Shower, WiFi, bed, and a bunch of friendly guys! You usually get invited to dinner, since they were already cooking enough for a dozen hungry guys, chances are there’d be at least a plate left over anyway. Then you spend the evening playing pool or watching ESPN. You could do much worse.

The next two days, I went to fire stations again, and while I didn’t stay at either one, they were able to find me a floor to sleep on. One might think the hardest thing about bike touring is the physical challenge, or the weather conditions, or dealing with mechanical failures, but finding a place to stay might literally be the very hardest part, and it seems like it keeps getting harder every year.

I satisfied the chili-in-every-state requirement by going to Braum’s, a local chain which serves burgers and ice cream (kind of like Dairy Queen). The chili was legitimately good! If you didn’t know it was essentially fast food, you wouldn’t know.

After crossing a river in Oklahoma, I realized I couldn’t name any rivers in this entire part of the country, except the Missouri, which I wouldn’t cross until North Dakota. However, I was able to recall that most of the rivers in the plains states run east-west, and I was riding north, against the grain. While the hills in this part of the country aren’t big, I’d be crossing all of them.

That also led to me realizing that I’d be crossing every interstate which ends with a zero, starting with crossing I-10 five days into the ride and I-20 only two days later. At some point in Kansas, less than halfway through the ride, I’d cross I-70, with only two interstates to go.

Odd that the interstate highway system seems to be biased toward the southern states, when my general perception is the country’s focus is overwhelmingly on the northeast.

In a journal entry from the Pony Express, I’ve already talked extensively about how this is most of what America looks like, the state of our small towns, etc.

In this part of the country, you see a lot of buildings where you can't tell from looking at them whether they've been abandoned or not. That goes for houses and businesses alike.

After seeing this, you realize why half of our country is so mad at “the establishment.” They’ve been left behind and no one even pretends to care.

Contrary to what one might expect, small towns are some of the loudest places you’ll ever go. Both the highway and often a railroad track go right through the center of town, rather than around it. Originally, the town was built around the railroad station, and currently, the city wants traffic coming through town, because someone might occasionally stop and buy a tank of gas, maybe even a Slurpee. In exchange for this, they’re willing to sacrifice the quality of life of each and every resident by making them listen to the sweet sound of 18-wheelers 24/7. Many of these towns are small enough that the entire town is within earshot of the highway and the railroad, even while indoors.

On top of 18-wheelers and train horns (I’ve already discussed that in a Pony Express journal as well), small towns are home to an unusually large number of dogs which never stop barking, kids which never stop screaming, people who mod their trucks to make them louder, leave their truck running for several minutes before and after they start/finish driving, rev their truck/motorcycle engine just for fun, and speak exclusively at shouting volume. My best guess is that after a certain threshold, it’s obvious there are other people around, and you might be bothering them, so you make an effort to correct your kid’s behavior, bring your dog inside, drive a vehicle that doesn’t irritate people, and you generally don’t make a fuss. But below a certain threshold, you forget there’s anyone else at all, and it figures you can be as obnoxious as you want.

Some small towns have a great historic main street, or at least they would, if they didn't insist on putting parking in front of everything.

If not for prioritizing cars over everything else, you could have a cute, desirable, walkable neighborhood, people would enjoy visiting, and it’d be a pleasant place to live. Instead, you look around and see the entire world covered in cars. It’s literally impossible to take a picture of a historic building without a car or a parking space photobombing it.

One town though, Pawhuska, got it right. They still had on-street parking, but only a little. On the occasion that’s not enough, there’s additional parking behind the destinations, which is where all the parking should be in the first place. The front of a shop, restaurant, etc. should be a pleasant-looking, inviting entrance which welcomes people to walk on in. Instead, every time you go to dinner, to the store, or go out for a special occasion, your first impression of the place is a parking lot.

You can tell Pawhuska is a place people actually want to go. As opposed to most small towns, it’s obvious that the buildings are in business and are doing quite well. You even get the impression that people drive into Pawhuska just to walk around. Think about that. People are so starved of a pleasant place to go for a walk, they’ll get in a car and drive for an hour just to walk around. The worst part about this is walking is transportation, so if their own city made any effort to prioritize pedestrian infrastructure, they could have the Pawhuska experience on a daily basis, while simultaneously going somewhere they needed to go anyway (work, store, dinner, friend’s house, etc).

There's an inverse relationship between car friendliness and general appeal. If you make something easy for cars, you make it undesirable to people. It doesn't matter how easy it is to get there and find parking if it's somewhere nobody wants to go.

Only five days after Lubbock, I found myself in Stillwater, home to Oklahoma State University. I realized this tour would take me through a handful of college towns. The largest towns I’d see were Lincoln, NE; Lubbock, TX; Manhattan, KS; and Stillwater, OK; in that order. All of them are home to universities which were once in the Big 12 (most still are). I miss that conference.
The next largest cities I’d visit were Emporia, KS; Williston, ND; and Spearfish, SD; and you guessed it, they also all have colleges.

OSU’s campus is nice, but not “too” nice. It’s more welcoming. The kind of place everyone would have a good impression of, no matter your background. Kind of like a Shiner Bock.

The dorms are tall, the residential and recreational part of campus is large, and the academic part is small, which made the “true” campus feel small. Maybe that was only in comparison to Tech, which is freakin’ huge.

At the end of the year, all the teachers on my campus got a ton of Sonic coupons in our mailboxes. In Oklahoma, and continuing through Kansas, I started using Sonic coupons a lot. While in Stillwater, I accidentally found the first Sonic location. I got a cherry limeade.

On my last night in Oklahoma, Texas beat Texas Tech for the softball national championship. I was able to watch. Light the tower!

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I am a carbon-based life form.