A Change In Climate

We headed out of Missouri today and drove through a small slice of Kansas to Oklahoma. If you missed my last post on Missouri - it got stuck behind the Sunday post I had pre-scheduled - you might have to go to older posts to view it.

The further south we get the more it warms up. We reached the high 80's today.

There are more places where the road is not paved or is down to just one lane. And other drivers are scarce - we barely saw anyone else on the road today. We did however see some livestock finally - cows and horses, some bison and one really large pig.

And turtles. Seriously. In the middle of the road. I thought the first one was just an anomaly, but then there was another and another ... and then so many of them. And snakes. And ARMADILLOS! In Missouri!

This poor guy didn't make it.

There are so many fun and interesting things to see on the road - especially on these back roads. I am loving the barns, the old signs, the gas stations and all the bridges.

 

 

 Here are a few of the many bridges we crossed over:

But before we got too far out of town, we had a little detour we wanted to take ...

Wild Animal Safari. This was a crazy experience ... the animals - yaks and bison, reindeer and llamas (to name a few) and my favorite - the zebras ... came right up to our car windows. We purchased food pellets to feed them from the park's store. 

We were instructed to open our car window just half-way down and the animals came running up to our car. They were very well aware that we had food and apparently they were also quite hungry!

It was after noon when we left the animal park and we were quite hungry ourselves.

We headed over the the original Steak n Shake for a bit to eat. We shared a steak burger and a chocolate | vanilla shake. It was probably the best hamburger we have ever had!

Then we drove and drove and drove to catch up on our schedule and we did. 

We stopped in Tulsa, Oklahoma for the night. We are trying to stay in old vintage motels (no chains is our rule - both for dining and lodging) but tonight that didn't work out. We had originally planned to stay in Oklahoma City. We didn't think it was a good idea to do that now and we didn't have any other reservations set up. We pulled into the first fun looking motel on the Route and pulled right out. It was so sketchy that we didn't even stop long enough to photograph their great sign! The second place we found looked promising and as I pulled into the parking lot I saw two police officers talking to each other through their patrol car windows. I asked them if they knew anything about the motel. One of the officers asked me if we were from out of town and I said, "Yes."

He replied, "DO NOT STAY HERE!"  He directed us to where all the larger chain hotels were. Better safe than sorry!