Oklahoma's Landscape

I must say, I really liked Oklahoma. I didn't really have expectations, good or bad, of Oklahoma. In fact I hadn't really thought much about Oklahoma at all until I got there.

Blue drank = gatorade

The order of the amazing host towns we stayed in were:

• Henryetta, OK
• Oklahoma City, OK
• Watonga, OK
• Arnett, OK

One of my favorite things to do in these tiny Oklahoman towns is to just walk around as the sun is setting. Everything is quiet, the air is cooler, and the conditions are less brutal than when we're biking at 1pm. We've moved out of the Appalachian foothills, then the Mississippi Delta, then the Ozarks, and now we're in the Great Plains region. This is also the dust bowl of Central United States.

The sky is huge out here!

There's always some obstacle. Now that the roads had flattened since the Ozarks, there's a new obstacle: wind. The headwinds in Oklahoma were very strong, but I liked them better than the crosswinds. The crosswinds were coming from the south, so they were pushing our left sides. This meant having less balance on the bikes as we lean into the wind to fight it back. When trucks pass, the wind is even stronger, and one rider compared the sensation of the wind form a truck similar to a wave in the ocean.

Some cross-country riders think that Bike & Build goes the wrong way, as all 8 routes are east to west. This is opposite from wind patterns, meaning that we are riding into the wind for most of the trip. Wind is tough. A hill has an end, and a descent as a reward. Wind just keeps going, and there's no end, and it just kills your speed unforgivably.

Wind maps