Catoosa to Afton, OK 05-06-2026 Day 26

We thought the weather would be a lot like yesterday – cool and windy. It was both, but not as bad as yesterday. We needed to go mostly northeast and that’s where the wind mostly decided to come from, starting at 11 MPH at 7:05 when we left the hotel. That morning’s breakfast was full of sugar and flour. I had a waffle, some instant oatmeal, and weak coffee and sugary yogurt. We were 15 miles up the road and Ron spotted a Braum’s in Claremore.

He asked if I wanted to stop. Needless to say, I turned it into 2nd breakfast. Ron was really after a Latte, so he rode another mile up the road to a Starbucks. I met him there when I had done my duty.

Claremore stretched over several miles of Route 66. There was clear road for a few miles and then we saw the shield for Sequoya.

In viewing the potential sites for today, we were told to look for a statue of Andy Payne in Foyil. Neither of us had ever heard of him. At one of our stops, I found this on wikipedia: Andrew Payne was the winner of the International Trans-Continental Footrace in 1928. He ran the 3,423.5 mi (5,509.6 km) route from Los Angeles to New York City, much of it along U.S. Route 66, in 573 hours, 4 minutes, 34 seconds, (23 days) averaging 6 miles per hour (9.7 km/h) over an 84-day staged run. The numbers that stuck in my head were 3400 miles, 23 days. As we fought against the wind all day, I kept marveling at his feat. Then I did the math and thought – that works out to almost 150 miles per day – IMPOSSIBLE! I didn’t take into account that 23 days was his timed running over 84 days.That comes closer to 41 miles/day, which is at least believable and very impressive just the same.

On the map, Bushyhead was up the road from Foyil. We saw signs and even some of the edges of Foyil. I never saw any town from the road for Bushyhead. Yet they got a shield and Foyil did not!

We had some long, hard miles getting to the next town of Chelsea. I had my second breakfast, but Ron had only had the latte and he doesn’t eat breakfast like I do. To be fair, not many people eat breakfast like I do, especially on these bike trips. We turned off the road into the town of Chelsea. It was the kind of small town that truly represents the heartland and “The crossroads of America”. We went to a small, locally owned diner for something to eat. Ron got some stew and a grilled cheese. I couldn’t resist. I got 3rd breakfast! A rare event, but I’d been denied 2nd breakfast for nearly all of this trip.

When we were done eating, we caught one other site as we were leaving town – the Historic Pryor Creek Bridge, built in 1926. It carried Route 66 traffic for 6 years until a new alignment bypassed the bridge.

There were a lot of empty miles until we passed White Oak. Here is the gallery of Roadkill d’Jour.

We saw the obligatory shield for White Oak. I will admit that I at least could see a school from the road as well.

On the way to Vinita, I hit paydirt. I was on the wrong side of the divided highway, but I could still get a look at several “Muffler Men” statues.

I had to interact with my new herd of followers.

Because I had stopped for a few photo ops, Ron had made it to Vinita way ahead of me. He was relaxing on a bench outside city hall when I found him.

We were pretty tired when we made the final 15 miles to Afton. As we passed through town, we saw that it was about 2 miles between the last good restaurant and our hotel.

So, we decided to stop and eat at “Nowhere on Route 66”. It had some good BBQ and beer. Just what we needed. There was more than we could finish, so we wrapped up the leftover meat for breakfast tomorrow.

We are staying at the only hotel in Afton. The furnishings are pretty sparse. There was no hairdryer, so we walked over to a fence behind the motel and tried to take advantage of the remaining sunshine and strong breezes to dry our clothes.

I didn’t have any place to really sit and type out this blog so I walked across the street to the “Buffalo Ranch Gas station and Convenience store” to see if they had a place to sit and wifi I could use. I got one out of 2. I got all my gear together and set up some Bluetooth tethering from my phone to the tablet to create my own wifi hotspot, since the staff were not allowed access to the WiFi password. They were very nice to let me stay and do most of my work, especially since I did buy a pint of ice cream to have here!

It was a long, hard day of riding, but it wasn’t miserable. It was easier than yesterday and tomorrow looks even better. Not a bad way to end the day!

The Ride stats are here. The 3D video is here.

The Not So Lone Rider