Wednesday, October 21st, 2026

Yesterday was a slog of a ride. Over two hundred miles of mostly straight 70+ mph type roads crossing the panhandle of Texas, into Oklahoma. We knew the first day of riding would be one of our worst. There isn’t much getting around it, the roads in this part of Texas are all this way. Even the smaller two-lane roads are fast. Our little 300s don’t love riding that fast. The more difficult part was the wind. The wind was constant all day long. I had to keep reminding myself that this is all training for the winds of Patagonia.

Even if the day was tough, we made it. And the last leg of the journal was rewarding. There were finally some hills and some turns as we approached Medicine Park Oklahoma, our home for the next two nights. Medicine Park is a cute old resort town, where they have built most of the buildings out of river rock. Not the type of place that most people know about. Finding out of the way small towns and cool locations is a main goal of this trip. Although we plan to go to bigger towns like Memphis and Nashville. The bulk of our travels will be bringing up to places like Medicine Park.

The urge to capture our travels using video hasn’t yet kicked in. I did test out the recording a bit yesterday, and beyond some learning on how to manage the power usage on the DJI helmet mounted camera, the camera did great. I didn’t bother trying the microphone mounted in my helmet. It was so windy yesterday that I am pretty sure it would have been mostly picked up wind noise. And I think the large thing was given that this was our first day of riding there was so much to think about and get used to again. Trying to ride the motorcycle, make sure we are going the right way, and try to think about testing out video equipment was a bit too much yesterday. I’m hoping that the riding becomes second nature and these other things just become so rote that I have capacity to think about the travels a bit more. Given all the extra gear that I needed to bring for the cameras and the drone, I hope this all seems worth it. Part of me at the end of yesterday was thinking that it wasn’t worth it. But, I needed to remind myself that I need to give myself time. And this is all an experiment, that I hope will work out. But, the only way the expirement is truely an experiement is if I run the tests. dmd