Traveling in the state where we lived most of our lives should feel familiar, but this southeastern corner of Oklahoma is like a whole different world. There are forests and mountains, rather than pastures and plains. Instead of sharing the road with ranch pickups towing cattle trailers, we are seeing a steady stream of lumber trucks.
Mark never got to use the cruise control today, because we were either pushing to get up a mountain or braking to get down. The Garmin showed elevation changes that went from 800 feet to 2000 feet to 700 feet to 1600 feet to 800 feet to . . . This was not a good diesel mileage day. We saw lots of roads that warned about upcoming curves with serious speed restrictions.
Tilting over on our side off a mountain didn't seem like a good alternative from going too fast.
We are driving through the Ouachita National Forest, and we needed some help to get the pronunciation right. We learned that it is /Wash-i-tah/ National Forest. We also drove through the Winding Staircase National Recreation Area. The pines look healthy here, and the hardwoods are just now putting on their tiny spring leaves. This drive would be beautiful in the fall.
Denisa enjoys taking pictures of perplexing road signs. We didn't photograph the first ten signs, but after they continued for thirty miles, we finally did it. We might mention that we did in fact have a center stripe the entire thirty miles that we were warned of "no center stripe."
We read the highway signs giving direction to our next destination. The signs prompted us to turn down the New Cedar Lake Road that the GPS didn't know about. On the screen it looks like our motor home is just driving through the national forest without a road.
About an hour and a half down the road, we pulled into Cedar Lake Forest Service campground. We got one of the non-reservable sites right on the water in the middle of a pine forest. I think we're going to like it here at Sandy Beach campground!
We have electric and water hook-ups, but we are sad to see we have absolutely no AT&T phone service here. In the three years on the road, this is only the second place we can recall with no signal at all. After getting the motor home set up, we went on a hike around the lake. It's a three-mile hike with some great views of Cedar Lake.
A spring hike in the forest means wildflowers. We won't bore you with all the usuals, but we had never seen one like this before.
It was a beautiful weather day on a nice hike beside a mountain lake. We are glad to see that we have moved far enough north to be rid of the mosquitoes that plagued us in Texas.
The creek running into the lake was a mysterious blue/green color. We're not sure why, but it looks like the glacier-fed lakes we saw up north.
Even though we had no AT&T signal at the campground, we found that half-way around the lake we had enough cell phone service to send and receive text messages. We sent a few messages before we headed on down the trail. We are really in the middle of nowhere at Cedar Lake.
It seemed like a great place for wildlife, but the only wild things we spotted were some brown moths that seemed to be feeding on the equally brown soil on the trail.
After our three-mile circle around the lake, we enjoyed a lovely evening at the campground. With no wind and pleasant temperatures, we probably should have put our kayak on the mirror-like water on Cedar Lake.
With views like this, we're very happy here at Cedar Lake campground in the middle of the Winding Stairs National Recreation Area of the Ouachita National Forest. It's nice to live here in the mountains of Oklahoma for a little while.
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