THE DIP FROM HELL

We have a love-hate relationship with Gertrude, or “Gertie” as Loni calls her.  You have your choice when programming a route to choose “fastest” or “shortest.”  Fastest uses the freeways or other major arterials, and shortest uses whatever exists as long as the total mileage is as short as possible.  We programmed our destination via shortest.  Cue the ominous music.

Gertrude has strange ideas of what is suitable for passage.  Remember the railroad tracks at the VLAT?  Well, today we proceeded on a US highway, state roads, county roads, and something designated as FM, or, as we later discovered, “farm-to-market” roads.  We declined Gertrude’s expertise when we hit an FM that was nothing more than ruts through a field, and proceeded on by guess and by golly (by now we were off anything that showed up on a AAA map) to . . . (eerie crescendo, please) The Dip From Hell. 

The road we were on ended at a T intersection.  Right at the T, our road suddenly dipped down about 6 feet in depth then climbed back up to the T, all in the space of about 20 feet.  We’re 25 feet long with the scoot rack.  No way we could simply drive straight through that thing.  We stopped, got out, assessed, failed to record the moment on the camera, and backed up.  Swung as far to the right as I could go, then angled down and left across the descent.  Whoa, Nellie.  We were tilted WAY over to the right, which straightened to neutral as the front hit the rise, then reversed WAY over to the left as we angled up the other side.  Yikes!  We had stuff shifting all over the rig, but it stayed upright and climbed out, without bottoming the rear end.  Sometimes this backroads discovery routine is bad for the heart.  I’ve previously cursed the height of the scoot rack, but now I’m thankful that they built it that way.  Guess they knew what they were doing.

We continued on through one tiny hamlet after another.  One of our favorites was Turkey, TX, home of country-Western start Bob Wills, mainly for its neat signage.   We’ve seen a number of these silhouette signs all through the panhandle.  We encountered one sign with an direction arrow to “Cement Cemetery.”  No, not a mausoleum, but, as we soon discovered, the local burial ground for the town of Cement, TX.  Some “towns” were nothing more than a sign and a shack.  In Memphis (TX, not TN), we did a 3 turn around-the-block uey in order to get back to a gas station whose sign, at $2.12/gal, had caught my eye.  Mostly we’ve been paying around $2.50.  We pulled in and only then realized that it was abandoned, with the pumps locked, and the sign a memorabilia of its closing date.  We’ve gotten our best mileage on the long descent from the high plateau of NM, with a couple of tanks over 10mpg.  Our usual is somewhere in the 9’s.

Having made good time despite Gertrude’s machinations, we decided to drive straight through to Norman, OK, and the Thunderbird Lake S.P.   The AAA camping book gave us the wrong directions, but we got it figured out after wasting some gas and got to the Fisherman’s Point campground, one of half a dozen on the huge lake.  Couldn’t level in our first choice site, so moved to another and got settled in under the shade trees.   This is an older park, but quite adequate.  It fills up on the weekend, but has plenty of space otherwise.

Upon unloading, a minor disaster.  We found that the scoot’s windshield had worked its way out of the mountings and had fallen off.  The good news is that the cover on the scoot held it, preventing it from flying off down the roadway.  The bad news is that is was banging against the body of the scoot, resulting in ugly scrape marks on the top left of the shield, and some scratched paint on the scoot.  I’m hoping the shield can be buffed back to clear, but that’ll have to wait until we return.  Fortunately, the fittings themselves did not fall out of the mounting holes, so I was able to reattach it.  To prevent a recurrence (I hope), I used two short bungee cords to act as restraints to help keep the shield posts in the mounting holes.  I suspect no one other than a Vespa owner will know what I’m talking about.  I’ll try to take a picture or two.