Alright, it’s time for a
travelogue! As many of you may be aware,
I was laid off for the first time in my career a few weeks ago. So it goes.
It was interesting the amount of advice I received from co-workers and
friends who had been laid off before, some of them multiple times. Everyone expressed confidence I’d be back at
work soon and several emphasized that I should make good use of the time
off. One co-worker in particular looked
at me and said, “Matt, you need to pick up go to Colorado! Do something big!” He was right, of course; I may not have this
amount of time off again until I’m at retirement age. So yeah, something big,
right after my last day, giving me time to detox and not think about even
job-hunting for a little while.
When you have a four
year-old and an almost-two-year-old who have never stayed in a hotel room,
well, big is defined a little differently.
We definitely didn’t want to book plane tickets somewhere, find out that
the kids are horrible travelers and then have a miserable time until our return
home. And getting on a plane with two
little boys didn’t appeal to either of us, even if it was just one flight. So we’d have to drive.
Where to drive
though? We wanted to go somewhere we
wouldn’t go in just a weekend so nearby places like the Hill Country, San
Antonio, Dallas and Houston were out.
But we didn’t want to drive too far either in case, again, the kids
couldn’t travel well. And we certainly
didn’t want them to have to put up with 10-12 hour driving days for their first
trip, especially since we hadn’t yet introduced them to the concept of watching
movies in the car. That narrowed it down
to the following places, geographically: Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma and West
Texas.
Louisiana was out. We have no desire to travel there except to
eat Cajun food nonstop and maybe, at least for me, catch some live Zydeco
music. You can get both in Houston
anyway. Plus swamp has no appeal and
it’s friggin’ summer; we don’t want to go to the humidity! Arkansas is neat but we’ve already vacationed
there, albeit way back in 2005 before kids.
West Texas would be nice but only when the kids can hike a lot and when
the weather is not insanely hot. That
left, yep, Oklahoma.
Jennifer and I both had
limited experience with the Sooner State.
She had stayed in cabins on some of the lakes there with her fam and
driven through before. I’d driven through
on several occasions including once on the way to Kansas City (stopped in
Norman to see the University of Oklahoma’s football stadium) and twice coming
back from Arkansas via the Talimena Scenic Byway in the southeastern part of
the state (one time with me). I also
count watching the Coen Brothers’ remake of True Grit. Oh, and I recall Highway 75 being one of the
worst highways I’d ever driven on, almost as bad as Interstate 30 between
Texarkana and Little Rock. That was
about it.
I knew from previous
travels and my awesome knowledge of geography (I’m also the most humble person
I know) that Oklahoma has a few mountains and hilly areas here and there. Sadly and perhaps not surprisingly, there are
no Lonely Planet, Frommer’s or Fodor’s travel guides to Oklahoma, our usual way
of researching in order to set the itinerary.
I ordered some guides from Oklahoma’s tourism website just in case
they’d arrive before we left (they didn’t).
What came to our
rescue? The internets! Particularly, TripAdvisor and some random
website I found describing the best natural areas in the state. Having little kids, we weren’t looking for
anything big and huge. Seriously, the
kids would be impressed with playgrounds, a nice zoo and getting to play car video
games in a restaurant. As adults, we
knew the vacation would be all about the kids anyway. So what would they like? Well, the itinerary we set, though we’d
totally play it by ear, was as follows:
Day One – Drive to
Dallas. Sleep at grandparents’
house. This was important as they were
the safe point we would run to in case things turned south on the trip.
Day Two – Drive west to
Graham, Texas. Yep, Graham, Texas. And no, we didn’t name him after the
town. Actually, I was very disappointed
we weren’t able to name our second son after a Texas town as well. According to Google Maps, there is only one
town named Trevor in the US; it’s in Wisconsin near Chicago. And we will go there sometime but only when
he’s old enough to spell it.
Day Three – Drive north
to Lawton, Oklahoma. A former co-worker
warned me about Lawton. More on this
later. But Lawton has two things that
made it appealing: a national wildlife refuge with mountains and buffalo and a
military base (for boys who love trucks, the only thing that beats a military
base is a construction site).
Day Four – Drive
northeast to Oklahoma City. OKC has both
a children’s museum and a zoo.
Day Five – Drive
northeast on old Route 66 to Tulsa.
Graham, like most little boys in the US, loves the movie Cars, so
driving on Route 66 would be a treat.
And Tulsa, like OKC, has both a zoo and a children’s museum. Actually, we’d heard that the Tulsa Zoo was
top notch (and it is).
Day Six – Hightail it
south through the hills and mountains over crummy roads to Dallas
Day Seven – Back on
home.
We wouldn’t escape the
heat as Oklahoma gets pretty darn hot as well; however, it would still certainly
qualify as big. Let’s do it!
One of the nice things
about being laid off is that you’re not in a hurry when you’re on vacation to
get going. We didn’t leave for Dallas
until mid-morning. And of course it’s
also nice not to have to worry about checking work e-mail in the evenings and
being available for random phone calls which usually never come.
It’s also nice when
you’re not in a hurry when you get caught in the infamous I-35 traffic due to
an accident. We were cruising through
Belton when Jennifer noticed one of those electronic billboards stating that
there was traffic congestion ahead. Super
quick, we went into traffic avoidance mode.
This consisted of the following actions:
1. Checking
the smartphone for good alternate routes.
I would have used the trusty Roads of Texas book but I was too busy
trying to get over into the rightmost lane without running anyone off the road.
2. Check
where the traffic slowdown was beginning, again, using the smartphone.
3. Find
the right exit and take it.
4. Admire
scenic downtown Belton and feel smug that we got off the freeway in time.
We headed up Highway 317
which runs sort of parallel to the west of I-35. At first there were few cars. Then, as we continued further north, we could
see more cars coming from the east, the direction of I-35, as people stuck on
the freeway sought alternate routes themselves.
We didn’t know what had happened but Jennifer’s smartphone app showed it
was bad. Eventually, as we got closer to
Moody on 317, by then a two lane road, we came to a standstill in, you guessed
it, traffic. Crazy.
It was at this time
that Graham needed to go to the bathroom.
The only bad part about getting a kid out of diapers (don’t worry, he’s
been out for quite a while) is that you then have to adjust your schedule for
bathroom breaks and hope the kid can hold it.
Good thing there was a little grocery store in Moody for us to stop in. It was there we found out that there had been
a bad accident on I-35 early that morning that still hadn’t been cleared up and
that the traffic situation on 317 was a normal thing when something was going
on on 35. I helpfully pointed out that I
was in their grocery store only because of the problem which the clerks
pretended made them feel better.
Jennifer found a little
side road paralleling 317, which took us over what appeared to be a dirt
parking lot but passed up all of the bad traffic in Moody. Pretty soon we were rocking along on FM 2113
on a collision course with I-35, marveling at the traffic back-up coming the
other way and feeling smug again.
It is important to note
that the official soundtrack to our trip was the Cars soundtrack. Graham and Trevor both love it. Jennifer and I like it as well but I only
like it enough to have to listen to it once a day. Surprisingly, Graham was cool with this and
Trevor, well, Trevor didn’t realize we were rationing it.
Speaking of Honored Son
Number 2 (a Rikki Tikki Tembo joke, read the book), he slept from maybe Round
Rock to Moody. Another factor with
little kids is driving around naptime.
Ordinarily he sleeps right after lunch but, if put in the right
situation, such as a moving car, he’ll fall asleep earlier. This caused a change in our itinerary later
on as you’ll see.
Dallas was
uneventful. If Trevor was confused that
we were only seeing his grandmother for one day, he didn’t show it (Jennifer’s
dad and brother were out of town for the weekend). It was also a good opportunity for me to hit
Hypnotic Donuts, the best donut shop I’ve ever eaten at. My favorite: the Espresso Yo Self. It’s “chocolate cake donut with in house made
real coffee icing, in house made salted caramel and a sprinkle of fresh ground
coffee.” Seriously, eat there whenever
you’re around. And Good To Go Taco while
you’re at it.
We decided on the way
out of Big D to stop at the stockyards in Fort Worth. Neither of us had been there in quite a while
and the timing was going to work where we’d arrive in time for the longhorns to
be driven down the street by the cowboys.
It was great for the kids and the non-Texans looking for a Texas-themed
time but you got the distinct impression that the fifteen or so longhorns
loping down the street were tired of walking the same ¼ mile loop twice a day
every day. On the plus side, I found two
awesome straw hats: one the size of a sombrero for mowing the lawn and other
outdoor chores and another smaller, more stylish and practical one like the Day
Tripper wears. Oh, and we got to see a
camel and a lot of foreign-looking tourists, definitely thinking they were
seeing the real Texas.
Trevor fell asleep
before we pulled out of the parking lot, as we hoped. We crossed Fort Worth and entered the drier
parts of the state. It always feels,
when going west out of Fort Worth, that you are truly passing into the
West. The vegetation becomes more sparse,
the terrain may become less hilly and you can see more of the big wide open
skies. It also coincides with the Thirty
Inch Line, the north-south line where, to the east, annual precipitation
exceeds thirty inches while to the west it’s below thirty inches. See for yourself:
This is the true land
of the cowboy and all of the Old West media, from Lonesome Dove to the Lone
Ranger. A random book on the area we’d
be traveling through is Black Fox, by Matt Braun, which was later made into a
TV movie with Christopher Reeve. It’s a
good read.
Our drive out west took
us through Weatherford, where we saw an awesome old county courthouse, Mineral
Wells, where we finally had a fourteen year question fully answered (it WAS a
Sonic, ha!) and Palo Pinto, where we saw, of all things, a British telephone
booth in the center of town (we didn’t check to see whether it was
functional). The Palo Pinto gas station provided
us an opportunity to explain to Graham what a beer cave is. After that, we stopped by the Brazos River
bridge below Possum Kingdom dam well, just because. It’s crazy to see these rivers that are big
and huge where we normally see them in Central and East Texas when they are
smaller and puny. We crossed the Trinity
the next day and, though it had water, it couldn’t have been wider than six
feet across. Possum Kingdom, due to the
ongoing drought, is quite low as well but I wanted to see it anyway (since it’s
such an iconic lake). Why is it named
Possum Kingdom, you ask? It was a good
place to hunt possums, duh!
We rolled into Graham in
the late afternoon, checked into the Holiday Inn Express and rolled over to
Firemen’s Park. I learned long ago that
a great way to get a sense of a small town is to visit the grocery store. Well, parks, since there usually aren’t as
many people, don’t serve that function but they do get you into a bit more into
the life of a town, essentially making you feel like you have a lazy afternoon
off. And of course you can see some
cool, random stuff. Firemen’s Park was
no exception. The playground equipment
was fairly new and pretty good but the crown jewel was the foot suspension
bridge, straight out of the movie Deliverance, over Salt Creek. Graham loved to walk across it, more for, I
think, the power of walking across than for the coolness factor of a suspension
bridge. Jennifer found out quickly that
if you’re the last person on it, you get the most vibrations and thus start
feeling sick.
The main highlight for
Graham of Graham was the Cruis’n USA video game at Potter’s Pizza. Usually we only let him sit and watch video games
for a couple of minutes before shooing him away. But aw, it’s vacation, so I gave him a dollar
and let him play. Thing is, he’s too
short to reach the pedals and the steering wheel is too hard for him to
turn. Therefore, he sat in the driver’s
seat but Daddy did the driving. And of
course, we beat an eight year-old girl who came over to play against us, Graham
telling Jennifer that he beat the girl.
Yep, you did. Of course, every
meal after that he wanted to have at a restaurant with a video game. So of course we never ate at a restaurant
with a video game the rest of the trip (while not intentional, we were ok with
it).
Sleeping in the hotel
went fine. We had booked a suite which,
at the Holiday Inn Express, just means an extra long room with two queens and a
sleeper sofa. OK, fine. We stuck both Graham and Trevor in the
sleeper sofa, read them a few books, turned out the lights and waited for them
to sleep. It took us all of two minutes
to realize, after listening to Graham complain over and over about him moving
around, that Trevor couldn’t handle sleeping anywhere but his
pack-and-play. Good thing we brought
that sucker along. Trevor happily
snuggled into it, after we fortified it with sheets all around it, four stuffed
animals inside it along with a pillow.
Graham was out not too long after that.
It was then we realized
that, when your kids are going to be sleep and you’re going to be stuck in the
dark with them, to have your stuff where you need it and thus avoid having to
fumble around blindly. These would
include:
-
Headlamp (this was VERY useful)
-
Book
-
Laptop computer
-
Bathroom stuff (i.e. have it in the bathroom
already and NOT in your suitcase)
We got better on subsequent
nights. The important thing is that both
Graham and Trevor SLEPT THROUGH THE WHOLE NIGHT. Heck, we were both asleep by 10pm and, since
they didn’t wake up until 7am, that was like the most sleep I’d gotten around
the kids since Graham was born.
The next morning the
boys got their first taste of a hotel breakfast buffet. They loved having breakfast but Jennifer and
I were most impressed by the machine that automatically made pancakes. And for those who have never traveled with
little kids, the hotel staff acts totally different to the kids than they do to
you. It’s so heartwarming, actually,
sharing your kids with others. Well, at
least when they’re behaving. Other than
making a mess at meals and occasionally being overexcited (usually meaning
they’re tired), they did fairly well.
We returned to
Firemen’s Park to help the boys get their wiggles out before hitting the road
to Lawton. Graham immediately wanted to
cross the suspension bridge again and climb rocks on the other side, activities
we were only too happy to let him do.
After that, we walked around the park a little more to find the other
random bridge of Firemen’s Park. This
one went over a pond at an acute angle but not at a high elevation. It was made of concrete and maybe only two
feet wide, almost like it had been used to run a pipeline across sometime
ago. The bridge was too much for Graham
and I to resist; we had to cross it. And
since Graham wanted to cross it, Trevor had to cross it too. And since Trevor can’t be trusted to walk
straight, Jennifer had to come too.
We made it across with
me leading Graham by the hand and Jennifer holding Trevor. Rather than walk the long way around, we
decided to cross back and save ourselves some time (and be able to get back on
the road a little sooner). This time,
Jennifer led Graham by the hand and I carried Trevor behind them. We made it about 4/5 of the way across before
the following interaction took place:
Matt (noticing Graham’s
attention drifting to some ducks in the water): “Graham, please pay attention
to where you’re walking.”
Jennifer (catching
Graham by one hand and wrenching her shoulder as he falls off the bridge but
avoids hitting the water): “Yeeeaaaaggggghhhhhh!!!!!!!”
She then pulled him
back up onto the bridge while I was still deciding whether to put Trevor down
on the bridge before diving in after him.
The water was probably only a foot or two deep at that point but
still. Needless to say, Jennifer wasn’t
sad to see the Bridges of Young County be left far behind. Still, it was kind of cool to think that we had
a good time in an out-of-the-way town that no one we know has ever visited,
most of you have probably never heard of and people probably just don’t go
visit for the fun of it. Heck, the Day
Tripper hasn’t even visited Graham yet.
Our Graham wants to go back but maybe that’s just for Cruis’n USA, eh.
We rolled out of Graham
north to Wichita Falls, the city we know best for getting state approval to
drink its own treated wastewater. This
makes it the second Texas city to do so, after Big Spring. Sorry Wichita Falls but we made sure not to
stop for water in your city (though we are well aware that science tells us
that not only is the water perfectly clean and that it is the way of the future
for water-strapped areas). Perhaps we
should have stopped there for the restroom because when Graham needed to go
potty, we had only Petrolia, Texas, to stop in (for you geography dorks, we
drove out of Wichita Falls on TX 79 instead of US 287/Interstate 44). Petrolia had a lone convenience store which,
though it was supposed to open at 10, wasn’t open when we stopped there at
10:50. There were about seven locals
waiting for it to open, informing Graham and I that “He ain’t showed up
yet.” Well ok then, guess it’s the side
of the road for us. Good thing TX 79
isn’t well-traveled.
Oh, and one road
note. You Central Texans know what road
rolls through Graham? Texas 16! The same Texas 16 that comes northwest out of
San Antonio to Bandera then up through Kerrville, Fredericksburg and
Llano! Well, we took it to its northern
terminus just south of Wichita Falls.
And you know what familiar face it Ts into? US 281!
It was like seeing old friends.
Needless to say, however, we didn’t feel that way about I-35 when we
were in Oklahoma City. That was more
like seeing your obnoxious next door neighbor.
We crossed the Red
River, thankfully finding that, at least at that crossing, it is indeed red (it
wasn’t at the US 75 crossing north of Dallas on our return). I, of course, had to stop and take photos of
the Welcome to Oklahoma sign (thank goodness the road was big enough for one of
those) and of the river while walking out onto the long bridge with no shoulder
or sidewalk (thank goodness the road was small enough for no vehicles to come
along). Then we rolled up a long hill
and up into Waurika, Oklahoma!
Count Waurika as
another small town that we found some appeal in. Waurika’s appeal? Well, lemme tell ya. We were looking for lunch at this point and
the only option in Waurika, besides a truck stop, was Sonic. It’s odd how up in that part of the world,
instead of like Texas where if there’s only one restaurant, it’s a Dairy Queen,
if there’s only one option, it’s Sonic.
This Sonic was located right next to the railroad track where a freight
train was parked. In fact, the
locomotive was lined up right with our minivan.
We figured out why when a guy walked out carrying a bag of food, crossed
the parking lot, strolled across the grass, got up in the locomotive and fired
that sucker up. It was perfect as the
train starting rumbling up except that he blew the train whistle, greatly
startling Trevor and causing him to cry.
We watched the train roll out somewhere to the north (Graham was very
interested in directions and where it might be going; I think I told him Kansas). We stuck around eating long enough for a
second train to come through, though, disappointingly, it was only four cars
long.
Our drive to Lawton was
uneventful except that we engaged in what we felt was a perfect traveling game
for Oklahoma: counting the number of casinos and smoke shops and seeing which
one we saw more of. We were tickled to
see that one casino advertised a Senior Day.
Lawton is a military
town dominated by Fort Sill, the last remaining active army fort from the old
frontier days, at least in that part of the country. We checked into the Hampton Inn, an act which
involved loading up the luggage cart with all of our stuff. Yeah, when you travel with little kids who
not only require extra equipment but don’t carry much of anything themselves,
you need those luggage carts located right by the front door. Look for them next time you’re in a hotel and
imagine me pushing a fully loaded one with Graham thinking he’s pushing, Trevor
running in front clutching a stuffed animal, apparently trying to get run over
and Jennifer trying to make sure no one gets injured and nothing gets
damaged. After a brief bout of unloading
and boys going nuts in the room since they were so excited to be back in a
hotel, we piled back into the van and drove out to the Wichita Mountains
Wildlife Refuge.
The Wichita Mountains
Wildlife Refuge is in a mountain range that literally sticks out of the
plains. The fact that most of it is a
refuge is pretty cool. We stopped off at
the visitor’s center at which the following conversation happened:
Ranger #1: Welcome to
the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge.
Me: Thanks, we just drove in a little while ago.
Ranger #1: Where are
you guys from?
Me: Texas!
Ranger #1: Well, you’re
the first ones from there here today.
Me: Really?
Ranger #2: Not really, you’re probably the 50th or 60th.
Ranger #2: Not really, you’re probably the 50th or 60th.
Me (without missing a
beat): Well, we WANTED to go to
Colorado!!!
Sorry for helping pump
up your economy, Oklahoma. Anyway, the rangers
pointed out where the buffalo herd was last spotted, where the prairie dog town
is and where Mt. Scott, which you can drive to the top of, are. If it had been just the two of us, I would
have made Jennifer hike ten miles. As it
stood, with kids, we had a good itinerary of scenic stuff with minimal walking.
Driving through the
refuge reminded Jennifer and me of Yellowstone National Park. You’re driving down a small two lane road
with no shoulder, continuously scanning for wildlife off to the side and
stopped vehicles on the road ahead of you.
The presence of the latter is a surefire sign of the former. And when you stop behind someone else, there
becomes this weird dance of their car moving forward, you moving forward,
somebody behind you getting tired of the wildlife and passing everyone, the
wildlife walking across the road in front of everybody and blocking the road
for a number of minutes and all the while, the wildlife acting bored out of its
minds. Luckily the Wichita Mountains NWR
has many, many fewer visitors than Yellowstone so, when we found the bison
herd, there were only three other cars there.
Graham and Trevor loved it as there were probably 30-40 bored-looking
bison. I was actually sort of stoked as
well: that whole Old West vibe, you know.
The prairie dog town
also consisted of a lot of bored-looking prairie dogs but at least they were
active. Trevor was sort of interested
but Graham wasn’t at all, interestingly enough.
Whenever he’s squirrely or in a funk in the mid- to late-afternoon, we
always chalk it up to needing a nap. I
was struck by two things. The first were
the two young ladies with a little boy who felt it was a good idea to throw a
Slim Jim to the prairie dogs.
Seriously? Second was that the
lone prairie dog book that we have for Graham and Trevor is The Great Fuzz
Frenzy, a book about a tennis ball falling into a prairie dog den.
I hate that book and
unfortunately it has colored my views of real-life prairie dogs. I can’t think of another book that has done
that about any other animal.
Mt. Scott was pretty
cool for Graham and Trevor. Having never
been up a hill taller than the best of what the Texas Hill Country roads have
to offer, they were quite happy to see the views as we circled the mountain
while ascending it. There is a parking
lot at the very top, making it a little anticlimactic that you don’t have to
walk up at least something to get there.
Still, we were higher up than the vultures flying around and had a good
view of the surrounding area. Well, it
wasn’t that scenic of a view but it was cool nonetheless. Graham got to bring out his inner mountain
goat by scrambling around on all the red granite boulders strewn around the top
of the mountain. Yep, he and I are going
to Enchanted Rock once the weather cools down a little bit in the fall.
After dinner at an
awesome local burger joint in Lawton, we returned to the Hampton and hit the
pool. Well, the kids and I hit the pool
while Jennifer cleaned up the van. The
van needed it after three days of travel.
Even though Graham is not a good swimmer yet and Trevor can’t swim at
all (and hates to wear his floaty), hotel pools are small enough and shallow
enough to allow one person to cover both of them. My mom told me before the trip that when my
brother and I were little and on trips “We would always be in the pool by 4.” Not bad advice, Mom, but Jennifer and I
decided to wait until after dinner when we could. Anyway, it worked, even in the Holiday Inn
Express pool in Graham which was, due to being on the shady side of the
building, close to bone-chillingly cold.
Graham and Trevor slept
great for a second night. The only thing
to note is that we learned to, after he had gone to sleep, remove the hotel
pillow from Trevor’s pack-and-play so he didn’t have to sleep in weird Chinese
acrobat-like positions.
The next morning we ate
breakfast at the buffet, to Graham and Trevor’s eternal amusement, and checked
out. On the way out, as we were wheeling
what looked like our lives on the luggage cart, we overheard someone in the
buffet area remark something to the effect of “Man, I thought we had a lot of
luggage.” We then stopped at a coffee
shop across the street to grab some coffee, leading to the following exchange
which may sum up Lawton:
Young Lady
Barista: Are you military? (meaning
she’d give me a discount if I was)
Me: Nope, just passing through.
Barista: Lucky you.
Me: Yeah, well, you don’t know where I’m going.
C’mon, it can’t be that
bad!
We then stopped at a
playground built much like Georgetown’s old playscape except with an even
better wooden castle vibe. You go
Lawton! Hopefully the barista went and
played there after her shift ended.
There was no good
off-the-beaten-path route northeast to OKC so we took Interstate 44 up through
Chickasha. I’ll say two things about
Interstate 44. First, it is a very cheap
toll road. It cost only $2 to go maybe
thirty miles. As Jennifer commented,
that would get you about two miles in Austin.
Second, there’s that line in the old trucking song ‘Convoy’:
Well, we rolled up
Interstate 44 like a rocket sled on rails
We tore up all our
swindle sheets and left ‘em sitting on the scales
Ah, Convoy.
Also, Chickasha is
pronounced ‘chick-ah-shay’. The only
reason I know that is from a former college classmate who was from there. We didn’t see a statue of him anywhere but we
also didn’t stop there, either.
Throwing a wrench in
our itinerary, Trevor decided not to fall asleep on the drive to OKC. We had planned on hitting the children’s
museum and staying there that night but we were NOT taking an overtired Trevor
anywhere. That would be courting
disaster, both in the museum, dinner and getting him into bed. Based on our wealth of Trevor experience, we
made the prudent decision to push through OKC on to Tulsa. Sorry OKC.
Lunch was in Mustang,
just west of OKC, in a Billy Sims BBQ. I
was irrationally excited because I had thought Billy Sims was the famous Native
American distance runner. Turns out that
was Billy Mills, the Sioux runner who won gold at the 1964 Olympics in the
10,000m run (and subject of the 1983 movie Running Brave). Nope, Billy Sims was an afro-sporting Heisman
Trophy-winning running back with the University of Oklahoma and the Detroit
Lions in the late 70s and early 80s. And
in that restaurant, they wouldn’t let you forget it, either. There was a shrine to him with a signed
helmet, tons of photos on the wall and even a sandwich called The Heisman. I bought a $5 t-shirt that said ‘Longhorn,
it’s what for dinner’ on it. Before any
of you Aggies get excited, I bought it solely because I wanted a memento of the
place (and figured Graham could use it, an Adult Small, as a night-time shirt
sometime).
Oh, and we also drove
through Tuttle, the home of former Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback at OU,
Jason White. Here’s how the Tuttle page
on Wikipedia describes him: “former
Heisman trophy-winning quarterback for the University of Oklahoma Sooners and
current professional heat and air salesman.”
Better update that Wikipedia entry, Jason.
Route 66, sadly,
doesn’t exist anymore as an official road designation. Oklahoma still posts signs for it but
officially we were on Oklahoma Highway 66.
The route from Oklahoma City to Tulsa is nice and quiet and fairly
scenic. We saw only three attractions
which you’d consider to be notable: a Round Barn which said it was famous (so
it must have been), some big gas station that looked like it belonged on Mars
and the Rock Cafe, whose owner was the inspiration for Sally from Cars. We drove past the first two because Trevor
was asleep but had to stop at the third because it had wood cut-outs of
Lightning McQueen, Sally and Sheriff from Cars in front of it. We stopped at the last one only because
Graham saw them (we were hoping he’d miss them). Unfortunately, the act of stopping woke up
Honored Son #2 who was then too cranky to go inside the cafe to get a dessert
(which we felt compelled to get since we were taking photos in front of their
restaurant). Instead, he and I stayed
outside and watched all three of the town of Stroud’s fire trucks (brush rigs)
rush out to an emergency (Trevor was absolutely transfixed).
We said goodbye to
Route 66 in Tulsa and checked into a Hampton Inn on the southeast side of
town. Tulsa was a bit of a change as it
was the first big city we were staying in a hotel in. In both Graham and Lawton, the hotels we
stayed in were by themselves, nowhere near other hotels or a major
highway. In Tulsa, the Hampton was in a
cluster of hotels right next to a major freeway interchange. The hotel was almost full due to a lot of
events going on, including a major softball tournament, but we got a room with
two queens. I asked to be on a different
floor from any sports teams, eh.
To go see Tulsa, we
drove to a downtown riverfront billed by TripAdvisor to be the place to be in
Tulsa to hang out with kids. It was
actually a sad place where some developer had big dreams of a huge riverfront
plaza but nobody showed up except a Melting Pot, a Mexican restaurant and a
t-shirt screening business. Graham was
excited to see they had a huge bank of port-o-potties to use, though.
Discouraged and tired,
we drove around randomly to find someplace to eat. We were going to give up and eat at an
Italian fast food place when we saw a local burger joint that had a burger with
onions grilled into it. This was notable
because it was the only thing we ever saw which could be described as an
Oklahoma food. Heck, I never even saw any
pemmican.
Graham then found a
playground and man, was it ever a playground.
It had a slide that was about 20 feet in the air and lots of Oklahoma
kids to play with. It was almost sad for
Graham to say goodbye to a new friend he’d made with us knowing they’d never
see each other again. Still, we give
Oklahoma top marks for playgrounds.
Graham was also quite proud that he was the one who spotted the
playground from the road (it really was him).
The softball and
baseball teams didn’t disturb us and the boys slept peacefully through the
night. We did have some softball players
at breakfast (the Sharks, I believe) and Graham and Trevor made a big mess, the
kind that compelled us to leave a tip on the table even though we cleaned up
the big chunks.
Next stop: Tulsa
zoo! We got a 50% discount due to being
members of the Houston Zoo (thanks Mom!) and strolled on in. Graham and Trevor were told that if they were
good we’d get them something at the gift shop at the end of it; the odds of
them going into Uber-Squirrelly Mode were 3:2.
The zoo had a train running around it, which we partook of, and a carousel
(Graham sat on an alligator...awesome). The
zoo also had a ton of random animals we’d never heard of like the sand cat
(which looks like a domesticated sand-colored cat but lives in the desert and
getting its water from the animals it eats).
After that, we trucked
on down to Lake Eufaula, staying in a cabin.
We took the kiddos down to the lake for a swim, which mostly turned into
me walking out 50 yards into the lake and Jennifer sitting and watching Graham
and Trevor play in the mud. Actually,
the little guys did want to come out into the water from time to time. Still, Lake Eufaula, while nice, has nothing
on any of the Texas Hill Country lakes.
The final night on the road, not
counting Dallas, was the worst one of the trip.
First of all, we got Klondike ice cream bars to eat on the drive back
from dinner. Trevor is an expert at
making a huge mess out of anything that melts.
Secondly, I stupidly promised Graham he could watch a movie back in the
cabin. Big no-no. This meant he’d be up REALLY LATE. I directed him into picking the shortest one
we had, My Neighbor Totoro, and he was the one who figured out that, if he
watched with headphones, Trevor wouldn’t be bugged by it. Trevor still didn’t fall asleep before Graham
was done, but it at least made him bearable.
Third, Graham woke up once in the night and we couldn’t get back to
sleep for quite a while. At least the
a/c was working and there was no noise from any of the other cabins (we noticed
the next morning that our of twelve cabins there was only one other one that
was occupied).
The next morning we grabbed
breakfast on the road at Mickey D’s. I
was surprised not to hear any comments from Graham about not having a hotel
breakfast buffet. We drove down through
Oklahoma on Highway 75 which, while a decent drive, is no Talimena Scenic
Byway. We’ll save that one for the next
Oklahoma trip.
We did have a notable stop in
Caddo, a very small town just north of Durant.
We had stopped at a local park there, one of those poorer parks with
metal equipment that looked like it had been put there sometime in the 1970s,
covered by weeds and rarely used (and with all of the weeds underneath the
equipment completely dead and likely liberally dosed with Round-Up). Right after we got there, a man sat in his
pick-up truck with the engine running for about fifteen minutes right next to
the park. When he finally left, a Caddo
police car pulled up immediately afterwards, driving very slowly past. Coincidence?
Or did they think we were drug runners with a public rendezvous? We did drop a suspiciously full diaper in the
trashcan that maybe looked like a drug drop.
Think I’m joking? Check out this article:
The rest of the trip was
uneventful as we crossed the Red River and returned to our home state. It felt good to be back, wrapping up a nice
little vacation that completed all of its stated objectives. We found that the kids can handle hotels, I
got to detox from work and we all got to enjoy ourselves in some places that
not too many people go. We’re totally
primed to do more overnight trips now, though likely being one night affairs in
places closer to home for a while. We
shall see. It’s exciting to know that we
have that flexibility now!
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