Big Boy, Pelicans, Airstreamers We Can’t Shake

We designed the week after the big Airstream rally as decompression time by a Corps of Engineers lake in Oklahoma. We’ve gotten some down time in, but it’s been a whopper of a week, overall.

On our way, we had a first: we abandoned a Harvest Host reservation after not being satisfied with the sloped site available to us. Now, Tracy wants me to emphasize that when you can’t get level and you have a compressor fridge, you risk lighting your RV on fire, so it’s not like we were merely mildly inconvenienced by the site. And it’s not like we’re noobs who don’t know how to jimmy a bunch of leveling blocks. We simply could not make it happen, so we drove away. One more example of Harvest Hosts overreaching in the hosting department, in my opinion.

Lucky for us, we were able book that night at the decompression campground we were headed to, so just a little more time on the road, and, actually, things fell into place nicely.

We’re pretty much by ourselves over in the non-hookups loop of this campground on Oologah Lake, with a lake-front site, so we can leave the kayaks out by the water and watch the sunset directly from the kitchen table as we play boardgames at night (it’s been cold!)

This post is going to be tediously long if I continue at this rate, so I’m going to give you just the facts, m’am.

The mystery behind all the electric sites being booked up in the middle of a fall week was that an Airstream caravan was staying there! Directly from the rally, this group of 15 Airstreams showed up over the hill from us, and damned if we didn’t know several people. They invited us to dinner in the pavilion, but we were socialized-out by then. Still, when folks walked over to our end to say hi, we didn’t jump in the trailer and hide; we chatted like normal people. Everyone was super impressed with the fact that we had so much shoreline to ourselves (they were crammed in). That’s what you get when you avoid hookups. (They’re on a two-month road trip along Route 66 and left for their next stop after two nights here.)

I am doing a sucky job at summarizing for brevity here. Maybe just captions?

The world’s largest engineered steam engine came through town, Big Boy. As it went by me slowly, it seemed like a UFO. I was brought to tears briefly by the strange encounter. All black. So enormous. So loud.

Turn your volume down if you press play.

On the lake all week have been a handful of American White Pelicans, which also inspire a feeling of spiritual awe for me, the way the sun shines on their tops as they spiral on drafts, then it hits the black tips of their wings as they turn, then the tops, over and over, the whole flock reflecting white then black as one.

Tracy saw in the distance hundreds, maybe a thousand of them spiraling upwards, preparing to migrate for the winter, like the ones I saw while kayaking in Arkansas a couple of falls ago. I can’t make myself disturb the larger flock on the water here while I’m kayaking, although I sure wish something would so I could see them all in flight at once.

From the campsite we could see Comet A3 each night just by looking toward the horizon. At the rally we saw the Northern Lights, a first for me. What a lucky couple weeks to be away from light pollution!

In addition to chatting with Airstreamers, kayaking, and ogling pelicans, a comet, and a giant train engine, I’ve been editing my rally posts into an article for the print edition of the Airstream club magazine. My friend Sherri recommended one of my posts to the club president, and who sent it to the editor, who said for me to combine all my posts into a recap of the event. It’s a pretty cool opportunity, but I’ll explain that when I post about it in full, after the print issue comes out first of November. Unless, once I see it in print I realize it actually sucks, in which case I won’t mention it again! Writing transforms when it moves to paper, and I’ve never written for print myself (plus, I no longer own an actual computer or MS Word), so I could be terrible at it. I guess this article will be my litmus test.

Today we go back to the Will Rodgers Museum (where we tried to park as a Harvest Host), this time to tour. We’ll try his birthplace and lunch in what looks to be a fancy local restaurant. Our good friend Shana sent us tons of recommendations for the area (she grew up here), but we keep reminding ourselves that this is supposed to be decompression week. What we’ve done has been good stuff, though! (I’ll add Will Rodgers photos later; I wanted to post now this while I have a moment.)