This morning I got a phone call from our friend Jaye, who had himself received a phone call this morning that the proprietor of the Kenton Mercantile was checked into the hospital for a fairly serious problem, and that the whole thing would be closed over the Fourth of July weekend. For a moment, it looked as if the second leg of the Great Oklahoma Road Trip might not happen, after all.

So, my wonderful friend Jaye started scrambling and calling around. Turns out there’s a Bed and Breakfast up at Black Mesa, and it looks like this:

Gorgeous, right? Jaye got us booked into a couple rooms up there for the weekend in their bunkhouse:

The B&B is right at the base of Black Mesa and from the looks of its website, the rooms are gorgeous. We plan on spending a lot of time staring into the clear night skies watching the stars and generally relaxing. The 20-person town of Kenton, Oklahoma is having a community cookout tomorrow night that we’ve been invited to for the Fourth of July, and I’m looking forward to climbing up Black Mesa and looking out over the rest of Oklahoma and parts of New Mexico and Colorado. The nutsiest part of all this? The place has free wireless internet! So, if I feel like it, I’ll be posting updates from way out in the Oklahoma panhandle. JUST DON’T COUNT ON IT.