Sun Sep 17, 2017 - Taos NM to Guymon OK

First off, sorry about all the typos last night. I fixed most or some of them (and will now present a fresh batch of typos tonight..)
We are in Oklahoma and it is OK. Crappy continental breakfast but met a really nice couple on their Goldwing (motorcycle) trike with a trailer. Their other bike is a BMW GS like my brothers, but they take the Goldwing on shorter trips like this weekend. Last trip on the GS he broke 4 ribs on a loose gravel road and they both had a really good story about that one.
The plan was to head toward Liberal Kansas but all the jawboning today put us wonderfully behind schedule, hence we only got to Guymon OK, which is actually a better town anyway (it always works out).
Rt 64 east from Taos took us immediately from the glitzy Taos town with oxygen bars, energy crystals, day spas and alpaca underwear, to a fairly narrow, kind of rough two laner up the mountain into the Santa Fe National Forest. Once again, there was little or no traffic (those Taos folks don't know whats right in their back yard) and the views were kind of Rocky Mt Lite with less crooked roads up not as steep hills to look at less majestic mountains and no snow. But still pretty darn pleasant and cooler than we saw in the Rockies.

At the peak it changed to a nice smooth narrow fresh paved road and we smoothly sailed down the other side, all by ourselves. At the bottom you end up in Eagle Nest which is a very big open meadow / valley where Indians gathered way back when. In 1919 a settler bought it all up, put a dam in and provided irrigation for all the surrounding farmers. Some yo-yo old guy in a 3 wheeled bright red Invader car tried to take us out by passing when and where he shouldn't have. I hope they slip ex-lax in his margarita tonight at the home. Grrrr.
And then we slowly but surely slipped the surly bonds of the Rocky Mountains (John Maggee anyone) and entered the flat wide open plains of eastern New Mexico.

We went through Cimarron which is an old town along one of the east west trails and we saw signs for the nearby Philmont Boy Scout Ranch. From Cimarron we change to Rt 58 which takes us to Interstate 25 where we head south for an exit or two. Now we had some disagreement over which exit to take and Dave got off the first one and I continued just past the exit. The radio still worked and rather than doing the technically more legal thing of going to the next exit and turning around, I just did a U-turn on the southbound lane and rode up the on-ramp joking about the police seeing me and when I got to the top, Dave pointed out the sign saying this was the exit for the NM State Police. Picky picky picky.
So we took a crappy tar and gravel road south to Springer, which is a pretty well put together town and caught Rt 412 which goes all the way across the really flat, empty western NM parts and into the really flat, empty eastern Oklahoma part.
We stayed on this road for a long straight time, but again, it is kind of meditative to travel out here with nothing from horizon to horizon. There was a little traffic and we noticed a lot of Texas plates which someone explained later in the day was because north eastern Texans go to the nearby mountains of NM to take a break from the heat.
We got to Clayton (finally) and stopped at a gas station / convenience store and the place was wall to wall vehicles filling up and people buying drinks and lunch stuff.  A guy from Tulsa chatted us up and said the north east part of OK was hilly and had trees (as apposed to here). We will keep that in mind as we head east.

We then realized we could throw a rock from Rt 412 into Texas so we said, what the heck, lets go down into Texas. We took Rt 87 down into Texas (at Texline, one of several towns that begin with Tex as it turns out), and then east on Rt 296, which is a really narrow, paved (we think) road with a speed limit of 70 mph (yikes), grass falling into the road, but gratefully, no traffic. Now on this looong stretch of road, I kept feeling stuff hitting my feet, which we think turned out to be fat grasshoppers that could not quite jump high enough to hit our wind screens. I had more splattered hoppers on my boots tonight than on the windshield for sure.
The temperature all day was a wonderful 70 degrees or so and not the 90's I had anticipated. That combined with lots of sun, made for a great day.

This section of road was not as barren as north east Colorado where we came in. The was some corn growing, quite a bit of hay and a lot of sorghum being grown.
This area is where the dust bowl was in the 1930's and you can see some signs of it here and there.
We turned north when we finally hit Rt 385 and shortly entered Oklahoma. At Boise City we checked the hotel situation and decided to end the day in Guymon, which is a bigger town than I had realized. These remote towns are really oasis's and they have to be, being so remote.
So we walked to dinner down the street. So ends the day.