Kaws Lake OK to Liberal KS
We woke up before the sun intending to make breakfast but the ankle biting insects were too nasty. so we just made coffee and hit the road.
This is the heart of cowboy country! Our first stop was in the town of Caldwell which had many displays regarding it’s history on the Chisholm Trail. We stopped to find a couple geocaches and were having trouble locating one that should have been easy, a woman from a nearby bank saw us looking for a geocache and walked all the way across the street to tell us we were in the right spot but that it was missing. That was very nice of her.
I never knew but Oklahoma has a Great Salt Lake and salt plains. We found the lake which is a channel off the Arkansas River. The salt plains were shiny white in the distance but we couldn’t find the access point and gave up on it.
As we drove along the terrain started to rise up with more rock outcroppings and some low mesas, approaching the foothills of the Rockies. We stumbled across the Cowboy Cemetery by accident, cool little stop and it had a geocache and a Pokestop!
Overall our third day in Oklahoma a lot like the previous ones, endless straight dirt roads and happy they weren’t mud. We saw a lot of free range cattle, many of them just standing in the road but they scooted pretty quick when you edged up to them. This is also where we began seeing cattle guards everywhere to drive across. Overall an interesting drive but lots of the same thing.
We began looked for a camping spot at mid afternoon but the state parks in Oklahoma are underwhelming to say the least. We stopped in the town of Beaver at a state park that was way sketchy so we kept driving later than usual to make it to Liberal Kansas and got a hotel. Walked across the parking lot for pizza and beer. It was much needed respite from the road. We each took 2 showers trying to get the dust off.