Day Five - Tulsa, OK to Oklahoma City, OK then a detour to Texas....

Today began bright and early at 5.30am when I awoke and couldn't get back to sleep. Must have been my body reacting to the steamed broccoli I had managed to locate and have for dinner the previous evening...(To be fair the broccoli came with a garnish of a baked potato and a 12oz top Sirloin steak...ahem)

Anyway, after cleaning out the breakfast buffet of bacon and coffee I set of from Tulsa and travelled original Route 66 for about an hour along narrow windy roads until getting bored with going slowly and headed off for the turnpike to Oklahoma City which follows the Route - but not religiously. A bit like me.

Oklahoma City is oh so pretty - as the original song lyrics of Route 66 say. And they're not wrong. The city is very pretty with some very nice old churches dotted about and a nice sense of scale. The outskirts were ugly by contrast and I saw rather more of them than intended as my GPS - Janice as I like to call her - got all confused....

I then headed south towards Texas through some lovely countryside at the southern end of Oklahoma before hitting Texas proper and on to Dallas where the traffic was terrible.

There was a way of avoiding the traffic - The President George Bush Turnpike - but I refused this option on principle. Particularly galling was the idea of paying to be on a road of that name....

Anyway, I toughed it out and nearly ran out of gas before hitting the main freeway south to Houston.

The Texans are crap drivers. Full stop. They hog lanes, they drive at stupid speeds (either too fast or too slow) and they duck and dive in traffic. BUT - this is Texas and so I refrained from advising them of their errors as I believe I am quite allergic to bullets and they dish them out down here with massive generosity.

Music today has been great - Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris on their recent country collaboration album - "All the Roadrunning". His great guitar and rough voice - her amazing clear and tender voice (considered one of the all time great female country vocalists).

Then all the JJ Cale music I own for hours - starting with Call Me The Breeze which had me turn the volume up to full and through Cocaine and After Midnight to Drifter's Wife and so on. Cale is a troubador in the original sense of singing story tellers. Simple, subtle and THE perfect road music for America.

Finally a return to some Sheryl Crow and repeat plays at full volume of "Run baby, Run" - definitely being added to my list of all time classic road anthems and then The Dixie Chicks again. They come from Dallas but have been demonised in their own state for making a derogatory remark about President Bush (see yesterday's post) so I thought I would support them in the Lone Star state they call home by playing them loud and proud in the car (albeit at the risk of getting shot by an angry Texan).

My main observations of the day are that America is very big indeed. I drove nearly 600 miles today and on the map what I drove is a rather short and unimpressive little line.

And, oh yes, Americans are VERY fat.

I had a quick bite at a roadside burger emporium - NOT McDonald's I hasten to add - and the combined weight of the four staff must have been close to a metric ton. I have never seen fatter people in such a confined space - hardly a great advertisement for the products they serve. But fat people - and I mean REALLY fat people - are everywhere in the US.

They live on junk food, do no exercise and turn into greasy behemoths. Apart from almost instant revulsion at the fattest - you end up feeling sorry for them. It seems like they just don't know any better. Moreover, the difficulty you have finding something wholesome and healthy to eat in this country is staggering - particularly by the roadside which is a mass of fast food dives and burger stands.

Anyway - I am beginning to form some first conclusions about America and Americans today which I will elaborate on tomorrow or the next day....

I am taking a "day off" from the trail tomorrow and doing some shopping in Houston and seeing one of my clients whose headquarters are here. Then Thursday it's back up to rejoin Route 66 and head further west....

Hasta la vista....