So day 3 arrives after a no win night in the Super 8 in west
Amarillo, Texas: leave the air con off and cook or leave it on and share the
room with an old Soviet era tractor that has never been serviced and runs on
cheap vodka and distilled boot polish.
Breakfast is at Ye Old Pancake Station. The pancakes with
maple syrup make a full English at a greasy spoon look like detox. I choose an
omelette with hash browns and can’t eat it all. Average place though the cute
waitress (of which there are very many over here) is transfixed with the Hugh
Grant and David Niven act Marcus and I seem to carry off so effortlessly…
Word of the week is: Marginal.
The death ridge has pretty much done its thing with orographic lifting by the
High Plains the only game in town with each day looking like Groundhog Day
that’s had an illicit liaison with Déjà vu.
Breaking things up we visit the historic Route 66 in Amarillo where
Marcus makes another schoolboy error and enters an “antique” shop. Being the
oldest thing in the shop he is unceremoniously added to the stock. Dead by day but
it may liven up at night time; I think Route 66 has seen better days.
Today we’re heading north on US287 in the vague direction of
south east Colorado 5 or 6 hours away. We’ll be heading through the Oklahoma
Panhandle and then likely through Campo Colorado. We’ll take a view along the
way of what we’re going to do. The next couple of days look slim but there are
still some murmurings of possibilities in North Dakota at the weekend. I think
we’ll keep heading north to keep our options open, perhaps taking in a National
Park in the Rockies at some point, in any event it does add some new scenery to
the trip. The big but is this: the
distance from central North Dakota back to Oklahoma City is epic and cannot be
done in one day, it’s a thousand miles…The SPC has a slight risk for Montana
tomorrow. If we could get there (another monster drive north) North Dakota
could be on.
We stop in Dumas for a break with some discussion as to its
correct pronunciation before heading north once more. We enter the more rugged
terrain of the Oklahoma Panhandle, once a neutral zone north of Indian
Territory now absorbed into Oklahoma. We stop at Boise City for a picnic lunch
in a small park, resisting the temptation to have a go on the kids’ slides.
We cross over into Colorado and pass through Campo where I
saw 5 tornadoes on May 31st 2010. Was that really seven years ago?
Peter has recovered the radar images from the NOAA archive and plays them on
the laptop which brings that day flooding back. A bit different to this year
sadly.
A 2% tornado risk appears way to our north east in eastern
North Dakota and western Minnesota, and in no time at all a video of a
landspout (a non-supercellular tornado) appears on facebook. We continue north and pass a couple of small
hills known as Two Buttes (pronounced two beauts I believe).
We pass through Springfield where we had to go to the
Sheriff’s department and report our accident in 2006 then on to Lamar for a
pitstop where I stayed in 2010 at the Blue Spruce enduring a particularly bad
breakfast. A quick review and we’re headed north again. We stop at Kit Carson
for a driver change and a stretch before commencing our relentless charge north
through the endless flatness crossing the I70. There are storms to our NNE
including one west of Fort Morgan that is severe warned and showing a TVS
marker. We keep going.
The roads are rougher up here with signs by the side of the
road stating no snow ploughing between 7 pm and 5 am. It’s been nearly 30c today;
I’ve only been here in late spring/early summer, what it gets like in the
winter must be something else. The road is making typing in the back of the SUV
somewhat challenging as we bounce all over the shop. We take a right onto US 36
looking for a storm.
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