Lone Star Ramble
By Jesse Mullins, Jr.

We’ve got a lot of ground to cover, so if we’re going to take a road trip all along the length of Texas Highway 287 from the Dallas-Fort Worth area to Amarillo and back, we’d better… well, eat some barbecue first.

Because barbecue is what wise travelers choose to fortify themselves for the rigors of long road trips.

And while this sampler platter at Shady Oak Barbecue is being dispatched with considerable relish out here on their screened back porch, let’s go over the Starter’s Essentials. Not many places in the United States offer the Real West experiences of the country found hereabouts and further west—from Fort Worth you can pretty much take your pick of directions, especially northwest, west, and southwest, and you’ll get a dose of what makes the West the best. For this run, it’s northwest, and 287, though not as strong on scenery, is perhaps better for history than our other opportunities. We’ll get to them another time.

So if this fits your fancy, you’ve got a great starting point, for starters. Just about anyone who flies anywhere goes through Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) Airport some time or other. Just get off the plane, take the north exit, and you’re immediately in Grapevine, an overlooked gem. After you’ve seen the Gaylord Texan, which started out to be another Opryland but took a turn and got very Texas and was already very big, and then seen Grapevine’s super-quaint, vintage downtown and its old-time railroad depot, complete with steam locomotive train you can ride to Fort Worth’s National Stockyards Historic District (and get held up by outlaws en route, to boot), it’s time to get westbound.

Barbecue consumed, we barrel out of Fort Worth (just 25 minutes west of Grapevine), taking our leave of Shady Oak Barbecue, which is beloved of God and is built in what was an old barn north of Fort Worth. Under a cloudless blue sky, we strike 287 in minutes, getting our first feel of this route, which is “home” for the next two days.

Following the wise dictum of foregoing the interstates as much as possible, but knowing the tediousness of the thinline highways, I sense that this is the perfect compromise. It’s four-lane all the way, but it’s a sort of hybrid between an interstate and a two-lane blacktop. Not very elevated, and having narrow shoulders, it puts you closer to the surroundings, and with more intersecting roads you’re more in the ebb and flow of the local lifestyle...

State of Grace
By Jesse Mullins, Jr.

The Great American West lives on in Oklahoma, as anyone will discover on a trip such as starts right here. Ride along as we let the adventure unfold.

Every Great Plains state has one. It’s that spot you reach on a westbound highway where you realize, this is where the West begins.

And not just every Great Plains state, but every east-west highway that traverses any such state. There always comes a point, for the westbound traveler, when one tops a rise and the horizon shoots away and there comes the realization that the landscape has changed. It might be subtle. It might be dramatic. But something registers in the observer, and that something is the feeling that, hey, here begins something special.

I’ve had that feeling on many roads, and I got it again going westbound on Oklahoma’s Highway 62, a few miles west of Verden, when I topped a crest in the Tonkawa Hills and before me spread the Washita Valley and the town of Anadarko. Interestingly, this locale, so picturesque here, is significant, culturally and historically, to the American Indian, as few places could be. This is the home of Indian City USA.

But we’ve gotten ahead of ourselves. We’ve got a trip to make.

In our previous jaunts through the Sooner State, neighbor, we’ve taken you through different parts of this diverse country. We escorted you up the 100th meridian—that would be the state’s western border—with travel writer Alan Wilkinson as chief scout. We guided a trek up the middle of the state, south-to-north. We went on another ramble a year ago when we traced the Chisholm Trail all the way across, going the vertical route again, this time down from Kansas to Texas on Hwy. 81.

Having laid these parallel tracks across the state, it seemed we ought do something different and fire off along a diagonal. But what diagonal? Knowing what we knew about the southwestern part’s Lawton area and the northeast’s verdant and historic Green Country, it seemed a natural to connect the dots and hit the high points in-between. We’ll go from the lower left corner to the upper right. So off we go, mis amigos, and let us make the most of it!...

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