Beast Mode

March 29, 2026 — Day 5

Route 66 Bowl, Chandler, OK — KOA, Tucumcari, NM

We got a nice early start heading to a Flying J about half an hour away. Minutes into todays adventure we figured out it’s one of those super windy days. This is not going to be fun.

On the way out of town we passed Chandler’s Route 66 Visitor Center.

They claimed to have RV parking but the entrance was nasty tight and they looked closed. Two strikes and we’re moving on. There was a lot of construction next door, maybe that the future parking lot? 2026 is Route 66’s Centennial, so all the towns are doing stuff, but Chandler better get a move on!

We chuckled over the name of this antiques store.

Somebody is having a bad day. You can barely see it but there’s a giant tow truck hooked up front. We wouldn’t want that towing bill!

Cheapest gas in the country, and we got $0.10/gallon off since we have the rewards card.

We are definitely not in New England anymore.

Weatherford, OK really likes their connection to Space. We spent the night at the Air and Space Museum on one of our prior trips. It is huge. If you’re ever in the area it’s well worth your time to see it.

Wind everywhere.

Except near Amarillo. Texas has so many windmills they have to curtailment programs, where the put the brakes on some of them. They have the ones in the windier areas spin. So they have these turbines not spinning. The cost of electricity can go negative, which means the operator has to pay to have their turbines spinning. An AI told Paul this information so treat it with a grain of salt. They can be wrong and when they are wrong, they sound so correct. But what is certainly true is that Texas is isolated from the national grid. And that’s why those hundreds of turbines cannot send power to the grid system everyone else is on.

Still not in New England.

The Post Office has to deliver the mail, but who delivers the Post Office?

We talked about this tilted water tower before. It is still fun to see it though. See Grey Hair Pony Tail Society. and Keep on Trucking.

The roads are straight, but not flat, we’ve been climbing all day, topping out at 4,000 feet. It was really hard to keep the RV in 6th gear, it kept on dropping down to 5th, the revs would climb, it got a lot noisier, and gas mileage would drop. The good news is that partway through the trip the winds really died down. We were crossing a time zone today and we were lulled by the early arrival time on the GPS, we need to add an hour to our body’s time, so we bumped the speed up to 65mph or so.

We gassed up again in Amarillo. It was hot enough that jeans were stifling. We both got into shorts.

We have to remember to try to check out Texas stations. They have 86 octane and the RV needs 87 octane. Now we’ve put a custom engine tune in, and Paul recently asked them to add 86 and they did. But they also were asked to change the transmission programming and it isn’t clear if they did or not. So we’re hesitant to run 86 octane. Fortunately the tank was half full of 88 from the previous stop so we were good. We didn’t want to add 88 octane here since it was $0.45 more and when you’re filling what we’re filling it adds up. Oh, and to add insult to injury they mis-scanned the loyalty card so we didn’t get our $0.10 discount. (susan here: bad Flying J!)

We have a soft spot for skoolies. For a while we considered building one out. We realized that would have taken years to accomplish. We decided we’d rather be traveling. This looked like a particularly nice one.

We made it to Tucumcari but went to a grocery store first. So we got to pass through town, it had several kitschy Route 66 buildings.

There were 50s and 60s cars everywhere, but Paul was wondering why not 100 year old cars, it is the Centennial, right? And just like that? One appeared.

This motel had at least three small airplanes, the one in the shadows is sticking out of the building, I wonder if that room has access to the plane?

These erosion gullies are everywhere. It must rain fiendishly hard sometimes and the water just carves channels.

We made it to the KOA and collapsed. Beast Mode is not fun. It’s especially not fun when there’s a lot of wind.

(susan here: there was one point where we were watching tumbleweeds circling in the wind. “Cool!” we thought. Then it hit us, the Super C (big and heavy) RV in front of us and the tractor trailer (even bigger) next to us. All three of us shifted. That sure was one scary moment!! 🙀)

Daily: 412 miles

Total: 2,090 miles

Driving miles/Day: 418 miles/day 

Overall miles/Day: 418 miles