Day 29 - New Mexico to Oklahoma

Our goal for today was to cover a lot of miles so that we were within a short drive of Oklahoma City, where we needed to return the trailer the next day.   Bronwyn drove as far as possible in the morning ... literally.  She ran out of gas across the street from a gas station.  

Our path took us near several places where my Grandmother's family (the Rhoads family) lived in the late 1800s and early 1900s.  The Cimarron Strip and Cherokee Strip region of Oklahoma have a unique beauty, but the area is fairly barren and we were left scratching our heads about why the Rhoads family decided after the Civil War to migrate from the rich farming land of southern Illinois to southern Kansas and northern Oklahoma.  Ultimately, the dust bowl and Great Depression drove the family to Colorado, Wyoming and then finally Idaho.   It is difficult to imagine trying to farm in this area today, let alone during the dust bowl years.  We had no problem understanding why my grandmother moved on to Idaho.


We pushed hard to make it to the Cherokee Strip Museum in Enid, Oklahoma, so that Joan could see the Land Office where some of her "Sooner" ancestors probably waited in line to file a land claim, but bumpy two-laned roads and lots of construction projected conspired to slow us down so that we arrived at the museum only a few minutes before closing time.  Just enough time to take a picture of Joan in front of the Land Office.

At 7 pm, we finally parked our trailer at a RV Resort and golf course, which was about 30 miles north of Oklahoma City.  After our last dinner in the trailer, Joan quickly fell asleep we cleaned the inside of the trailer and repacked the back of the truck.  


It seemed sad that the trailer portion of our trip was coming to an end.  We had covered almost 6000 miles with the trailer and it had served us well.  Bronwyn is even talking about buying a trailer and doing trip through the northwestern U.S. states and western Canadian provinces next year.