May 3 – I think we’re in Kansas, Toto

Today almost made up for yesterday. The rains are gone for now, the road from Dalhart TX to Liberal KS (US54) is flat and for the most part has good pavement and a wide shoulder. We started today’s ride at 7:30 when the tour leader, Mike, decreed that it was light enough to start. As the Texas panhandle is the Western most region of the Central Time zone, dawn comes later. I joined a fast moving paceline of seven riders. We were working well at 19 mph for about an hour. Then we were passed by a second paceline of eight riders and when the two groups joined together our speed increased to over 23 mph. While I could hold the pace this was too large a group, if anyone had a problem several riders were going to be involved in a crash. I dropped back and continued at a slower pace. Fortunately, there were no crashes and after 35 miles the riders broke up into smaller groups of 4 to 5 people. This was far safer and probably let the riders catch a few glimpses of the country side.

What do I mean by this? When I am in a paceline I have one thing on my mind, the distance between my front tire and the person I am following rear tire. I want my tire to be as close as possible without over lapping on either side and never having our tires touch. If that happens I will almost certainly fall, as will a few of the riders behind me. Since my ideal distance is 6 inches to a foot, all of my attention has to be on the wheel in front of me. I also have to trust that the other riders are doing the same thing.

While riding alone I passed some large windmills, notice the truck in the picture. They were hardly moving today, for me that was nice but for power generation it has some drawbacks. As I took the picture I was passed by Bob Long who said that these were smaller windmills that only generate 1.6 megaWatts. What does this mean? Your monthly electric bill is for so many kilowatt-hours. When turning these windmills generate 1600 kiloWatts each hour.

When I talked to Bob I discovered that he owns a trucking company that specializes in hauling oversized objects, such as prefabricated pieces of these windmills. I also learned that he grew up in Fairlawn NJ about ten miles from Rutherford NJ, the town I grew up in. Who would have thought that we would cross paths 40 years later while riding bicycles across America?

We rode through the Oklahoma panhandle. There were few things of interest along our route. I saw some of these radial arms that are used to irrigate farmland. You can see them from airplane windows as large green circles or in Google Earth images. Well the radial arms are half a mile long; the circles are a mile in diameter! Rutherford NJ is basically a mile square; until I went to MIT the boarders of Rutherford pretty much defined the edges of my universe. Not that I didn’t see a large amount of the area around Rutherford and the country as well, but always with my parents or while supervised by other adults.

The only notable town we went through in Oklahoma was Hooker. Hooker, population about 1200 has done everything it can to attract tourists based on its name. There are tee shirts with the town name used in just about any way you can imagine and then some. For a town that started because the steam engines need to get more water every ten miles and today has a farmers’ co-op silo along side the train tracks it has done what it can to promote itself.

We crossed the boarder into Kansas and are now in Liberal KS. I do not know about the political views of the locals but the one café I at in had a country Western / religious teamed radio station playing as background music. The station was from Liberal KS. About 20 years ago Liberal discovered that no town in Kansas had laid claim to being where Aunt Em’s farm was located, so Liberal declared itself to be he site. The information center is at One Yellow Brick Rd, billboards proclaim that Liberal is Oz-some, and there are statues of the characters and streets named after them in downtown.