Return Trip

An earlier picture from when they still had a sign.



Today is our second day home, and I can give you the highlights of the return trip. The new tires on the trailer did great. Most importantly, it was a safe trip. We followed the same schedule coming west, but in reverse: 360 miles, and two 500 mile legs. Those are round numbers. Everyone wonders what a trip will cost, so I’ll crunch the numbers tonight and give you the breakdown on that. We had strong headwinds the last two days, which put an even greater dent in the fuel budget. I’d go for over an hour at a time that the truck would never shift out of the passing gear because of the wind against us.

Just before arriving home, we stopped in the town of Pond Creek, OK, for dinner at a restaurant with an unlikely name: Greazy Steve’s Food Prep Company. We drove by it on a number of trips thinking it must be a sausage packing plant or something, but when we saw a crowd out front on one trip, we investigated closer to find it was actually a diner. The food is wholesome, and if you like rustic, this is the place.

The first thing we noticed on entering town was a lot of gas station canopy, sign, and tree damage. Pond Creek had five tornadoes grind their way through town a week ago. The damage was about what I’d expect from EF-1’s, but that’s just a guess. A week into our trip we heard that the town of Woodward, close to an hour west of us, suffered a major tornado that killed six people. We saw in the local paper that two weeks after the storm, a woman riding her horse near a reservoir found a laminated photograph of a soccer team with a name underlined. She sent it to the Woodward, OK, newspaper, who got it back to its rightful owner. Two other photographs were found closer to Woodward, but this one was discovered in Kansas, 125 miles from the man’s home! He fortunately was not at home when his house disappeared. The three pictures are all that remain of the man’s previous life.