Stinnett, Texas 10-18

This morning was icy cold. The low was 37, but the wind was cranking and the wind chill must have been in the 20’s, it shook us pretty good a couple of times. We decided to go south. To many of the places we wanted to go through in Colorado were going to be too cold, highs like 32…ick. Dodge City didn’t really give us a warm fuzzy feeling and it was so windy and cold we didn’t want to hang out there.

South of us was Hooker, Oklahoma, it just called to me…hmm…past life maybe?! There was a Passport America park there so we made that our target. We took 56west to 83 south through Liberal, which incidentally has Dorothy’s house; we didn’t stop and check it out. From Liberal we took highway 54 south west to Hooker. Well, we found the 5 site park and we were not really impressed so we decided to head south to a Corps of Engineers park that was supposed to be south off of highway 94 at Optima Lake. Well, we never found it. We took a break at a rest stop there in Hardesty to figure out where we wanted to try next.

We have a Full-Timers guide to free and almost free campsites compiled by a couple we had met in New Mexico, and in Texas north-east of Amarillo were several towns that had city parks that were free unless you stayed longer that 72 hours. Most have water and electric and dump stations. So we headed west on 412 to Guyman and then south on 136. Oklahoma’s 136 was narrow and very bumpy, as we passed into Texas it became smooth and had shoulders. All along the way we passed fields of new green shoots, fields of cotton, sorghum and in Texas were sunflowers. We also passed cattle feedlots, definitely have to shut the fan off when you go through those places! We also passed “wind farms”. We hadn’t planned to get back into Texas this year so we enjoyed seeing the yuccas and prairie dogs again.

So we took 126 to Stinnett, Texas and found their little city park. It is a block back from the main street so it is reasonably quiet AND no trains. Don’t know how that happened. We left this morning at 9:50 and landed at 3:20 which wasn’t bad considering we were just wandering around, at least that’s what it felt like. We traveled 228 miles.

Now we are just planning how and where to go from here. As we both loved the Grand Canyon we may head over there. It is getting cold there, but not as cold as up in Colorado.