Day 42, nearo day, 30 miles, Tulia to Dimmitt,TX
Day 41, 59 miles, Turkey to Tulia, TX
Day 40, 57 miles, Childress to Turkey, TX
I rode into Turkey, Texas, with a scowl on my face, a chip on my shoulder and my steady hand ready to draw. Turkey ain’t the kind of town you ride into with your guard down.
It was nigh on 2 o’clock and hitting 101 degrees. I came off the Caprock Canyons Trail, more of a rock-filled bygone railroad bed that ain’t seen a train in at least 50 years. Getting to the trail wasn’t fun either. It included a 100-foot mud bog that tried like hell to suck my shoes off with every sunken step as I yanked my 60-lb. loaded steed mud hole to mud hole. Something stung me on my side right in the middle of it, leaving a welt three days later. A rancher in a truck waited patiently on the other side for me to hobble my way through. “You don’t got 4-wheel drive on that thing?” he asked with a smirk. Reasonable question.
It was Day 40 of my 70-day xUS bike trip, amid a three-day heat wave pushing temps into the 100s across the Texas panhandle. And the hot, rough, untended Caprock Trail worked me into a tither as I finally entered the tiny town of Turkey, Texas. 
Then I rode up to the Hotel Turkey and traveled back in time.
The Hotel Turkey is like a throwback, in all the good ways, to a time before international hotel chains and interstate highways. It’s like stepping back a hundred years – which is how old this hotel is – and experiencing life as a drifter in the panhandle plains in need of a bed and a drink, not in that order. 
If you’re ever in this part of the panhandle, exactly between Amarillo and Lubbock, (say, on a road trip from Albuquerque to Dallas?), the Hotel Turkey is a must-stop, for the bygone experience of taking a room at an inn, downing a whiskey in the saloon and being treated as a friend, not a customer. (Commercial concluded. But seriously.)
Completing the retro feeling in Turkey was a quick bike ride across town to visit the Bob Wills Museum. Turkey, TX, happens to be the home of Bob Wills, the King of Western Swing. Heard of him? He was huge across Texas and the Midwest in the late 1930s and 1940s.
This is life on the road. Quick experiential juxtapositions that yank your emotions from one pole to another. One minute you’re huffing and puffing through a mud field not sure if you’ll make it through, and a few minutes later you’re sipping ice cold lemonade on a ridiculously comfortable leather couch being cooled by an ancient ceiling fan in a quaint hotel lobby. One minute you’re fighting with every rev to make way forward into a forbidding headwind, the next minute you turn a corner and that same wind is delightfully pushing you fast forward.
It’s not just life on the road, I guess. It’s life. One day you feel like your world could end and everyone hates you. The next day things fall into place and some friends unexpectedly do something that makes your day.
It’s what keeps us going. This notion of hope that, when things aren’t great, they’ll get better. It’s why someone can make it all the way across the country on a bike. Not because it’s easy or always fun. But because you know and trust that no matter how hard it gets one minute, the next one might be amazing, and often is.
One minute you’re swearing at yourself for taking this muddy, impossible trail. Two minutes later, you come across Hotel Turkey.