Had some breakfast at the Liberal Inn then set off. I was worried about how muddy the trail might be after yesterday’s rain, but I thought I’d go check it out then decide if I needed to bypass some of the trail to get to a drier section. I’m all packed up and ready to go when I notice my phones aren’t charging (one is a ‘phone’, one has no SIM card and is my GPS). I fiddle with it for a second, then realize that yesterday during the rain storm, I hadn’t unplugged the cords from the USB outlets so water was able to get in. I think it fried the DC-DC converter. I’m trying to decide what to do b/c I have to check out of the hotel, but I’m picturing a scenario where I have to stay another night fixing this. I end up checking out and just driving around town looking for something helpful. I find a Polaris dealership called Trailers and Trails (they also sell trailers ha), and they offer to get me a female cigarette lighter receptacle from their bone-yard of broken RZR’s and Ranger’s out back. So I take them up on that, then ask if they’ll let me borrow a soldering iron too. I end up cutting off my old USB outlet and soldering in the female cigarette lighter receptacle in its place, then electrical taping the crap out of it. Mind you, this process lasted like two hours. Eventually I get it all done, replace a burned up fuse, then drive to LUV’s where I buy a cigarette lighter to USB adaptor. It’s like 130PM now, so I’m hopeful the mud has started to dry up. I set off on the trail, and at first everything is great, hard packed roadbase mostly and I’m flying. Then I start getting into damp sand and dirt, and it is bad news. There are giant mud holes I’m avoiding, but the ‘dry spots’ are this deceptive damp mud that looks dry on top but is super slick with any weight on it. My back end is all over the road. I wish I had a camera pointing backwards, because my tire tracks are like S-curving everywhere. I lay the bike down several times, and have too many close calls where I just barely catch it with a foot before it falls. I don’t know if I could have made it through this with the DR650, and certainly not with the 50/50 dirt/street tire I was running. I needed a full knobby to get any traction in that sand, where I was something digging trenches a foot deep. At one point I was stuck and had to get off and walk the bike through the mud while gunning the throttle. My temperature light came on three times, so I had to take several breaks to let the bike cool off. On one of these breaks, I big crew cab one ton truck pulling a flatbed trailer pulls up and asks if I’m ok. I tell them I’m just cooling off so they drive on, but then I see there are about 10 dead hogs just thrown into the back of the trailer. Kinda gross, hopefully they processed them before they spoiled. It’s weird, I’ll be driving through miles of nothingness, just flat fields, but then a group of huge buildings will come up and they are just full of hogs. They look similar to what I saw earlier in the trip, but with chickens. Also, there are these water pumps every once in a while that pump water to the fields, and they are big V8 engines with open headers. I haven’t seen one running but I bet they are loud! Once I hit a main highway, I say screw this mud and get on the highway and head to Boise City, OK which was the end of the segment. I get some gas then find a car wash to hose the bike off because it is covered in mud. Then I decide to go camp in Black Mesa State Park about 30 miles outside of town and camp (http://www.travelok.com/listings/view.profile/id.631).
