Visiting friends, Collecting Oklahoma, and "seeing" the annular solar eclipse

On Friday, we left Kansas and headed south into Oklahoma...

... we soon were welcomed into Oklahoma -- on the Will Rogers Turnpike -- Oklahoma has a LOT of toll roads. I thought the speed limit signs were interesting too -- the max speed, and the minimum speed, with a warning at the bottom "No Tolerance"! I was a little concerned because we usually drive about 62-63MPH, but since it was raining, sometimes we drive a little slower... but the rain stopped within a short distance, so we stayed above the minimum.

It was also interesting because the turnpike has one toll plaza, I guess somewhere near the middle of the whole length of the road. If you got off before then, you paid cash at the exit. If you got off after the toll plaza, but before the end of the turnpike, you had to show a receipt from the toll plaza and they would give you a refund for the amount that you had not driven. I had looked up the night before, and I thought our North TX Toll Tag would work on the Oklahoma roads, but when we were driving on the turnpike, it indicated only PikePass worked, so we went through the manned plaza -- also so we could get a receipt. I asked at the plaza and she said that the North TX Toll Tag should be working, but that it was not responding to her system.  Something to look into before we got back into Texas. We paid $20.50, got a receipt, and then took the next exit (that was where we wanted to get off), and with the receipt, got $9.50 back. It seemed like a weird system to us...

We headed south on US-69, heading to an RPI park in Checotah, Oklahoma. Friends Dale and Cheryl had let us know that they are living not too far from US-69 and wanted to meet up with us - so we had arranged to meet them at the Walmart in Muskogee and go out to lunch. We had a wonderful visit (and lunch) with them -- about 3.5 hours long! But we forgot to take a picture! Just imagine 4 happy faces of friends getting together and catching up on the last several years in our lives.

We got to Terra Starr RV Park and got checked in -- this is the third RPI park we've stayed at. The first one (Hart Ranch in South Dakota) was by far the nicest, but this was okay for an overnight stay.

While there, I took pictures of both of our Toll Tags (installed on the front windshield of the Jeep and Gracie) and set out to figure out why they weren't working... Online, I could see that my account was marked as inactive...

So Saturday morning, I called NTTA (North Texas Tollway Authority) -- the fellow I spoke with seemed to be baffled by the problem I was trying to solve and told me that he could mail me new Toll Tags -- that wasn't going to help for our need to use the toll roads around Dallas over the next couple of weeks... so he suggested that I stop by a Toll Tag office in the Dallas area. I decided to leave it at that and just try to avoid using the toll roads...

As we were driving on US-69 continuing south through Oklahoma, although the day had started out totally cloudy, it was now sunny, but not as bright as it might normally be. We remembered that it was the day of the annular eclipse. We started looking for a place we could pull off and use a pin-hole "scope", but we weren't having luck finding a place to pull Gracie off the road. Carl decided to see if he could tell if a pin-hole scope would work, and tried it with the sun coming in the front windshield. It turned out we were in a town and stopped at a stop light, so he could get a couple of pictures...

Pin hole displayed on Gracie's dashboard...

... close-up, you can see the "bite" taken out of the sun by the moon!

Since we were stopped at a red light, I took a picture of Carl taking a picture of the pin-hole scope's image!

A couple of hours later, we re-entered Texas -- we missed the "welcome" sign, but got a picture of the Texas Star at the welcome center rest area.

We were last in Texas almost two years ago -- December 2021!!! I hadn't realized how much I missed being in Texas until we were on our way back. I'm thankful that we're going to have a couple of weeks to visit in the North Texas area.

By the way -- I called NTTA again when we stopped for fuel just north of McKinney, and got a different support person, and he was able to clear up all the issues with our tolltags and they are now working! Hurrah!!!

And... if you look at our "States Visited" map, we've visited 46 of the lower 48 now -- missing only Kentucky and Colorado! We have Alaska planned for next summer, and possibly Kentucky too. There are many places we want to visit in Colorado, but it isn't on any specific plans yet.