The Adventure, part 1

Greetings from Springfield, CO, pop. 1,562. Time zone: Mountain. Meaning that I'm currently two hours behind all you East Coast losers.

Willie, Ixi, and I began our three-day adventure today. It's spring break, so we decided to get out of town for a few days. We don't have a lot of plans, but we decided to leave and go west, figure it out as we go. We started out driving west from Stillwater. We first drove through Enid, OK, where we saw a yard in front of a government building, full of black silhouettes of cattle and cowboys. Unfortunately, we were not quick enough to get a picture. We then passed through the town of Lahoma. That's right, Lahoma, Oklahoma. I hope their sister town in named Ok.

We then reached our first destination, Glass Mountains, also known as Gloss Mountains, several ranges of selenite mesas in Northwestern Oklahoma.

One of the mesas, seen from the bottom.

From the top.

After climbing to the top.

We climbed to the top and wandered around the mesas for about two hours, taking lots of pictures and generally enjoying the view. (I'll upload more pictures to a different site and provide a link later.) Then we left, and drove through some more of the beautiful painted desert.

Then we reached the Oklahoma panhandle. I thought the rest of Oklahoma is flat and barren. But then I drove through the panhandle. For about the first hour, it was quaint to see nothing for miles on miles around you. Then for the other hours, you start counting tumbleweeds that blow across the highway (there are tumbleweeds!) and signs you see for cemeteries (they advertise those around here, and sadly they're some of the only signs you see; there seem to be more cemeteries than actual towns) or noticing whether the things connecting powerlines to their poles are white or green. Let me tell you, five hours of that. My god.

The Oklahoma panhandle. This is a metropolis compared to the rest of it.

Then we finally reached Boise City, one of the westernmost towns in the state, with quite a cute little downtown area. In a roundabout in the middle of the town, we turned north and headed toward Colorado. On our way out of town, we came across this sign:

What!? Brontosaurus crossing? What is this? Then we found the Bronto about to cross:


Suddenly, those five hours of nothing were worth it and behind us. And soon we made it to Colorful Colorado. (Which it turns out, is the same dull brown color as Oklahoma.)


We're now in the Starlight Motel in Springfield, which is also quite the quaint little mainstreet town. I'll have picture of it tomorrow, along with this lovely motel and its woodpaneled walls. Tomorrow we're going to make a quick jaunt through New Mexico before heading to Amarillo, TX, where we hope to see an armadillo and drink some amaretto. And possibly get in a saloon fight. Assuming the random motel we find ourselves in then has internet, I'll post more tomorrow night.