Chickasaw and Turner

 

I had a little bit of engine trouble, as in my Check Engine Maintenance light is on. I called the Chevy dealer and they can't get me in for another two weeks. Bummer. I found a company called YourMechanic who does house calls. They came out and checked the codes. Coolant Fan issue. The guy said there was a loose plug, he plugged it in and the light went out. I sort of think he might have just cleared the code, but what do I know.

There Is A Fowl Odor In The Air

 

In Oklahoma City, there is an artist collective who have converted a 6000 sq. ft. building into an: 

“Oklahoma City based collaborative company creating immersive experiences that awaken wonder, build community, and make the world better” 

Impressive. There was a series of rooms, different styles, different feels.  The music was different in each room and helped you to immerse yourself even more into where you were at.  

They had a special exhibit called Doorways created by Amber Rae Black and Teddi Fokas. You walk into a circular dark room. Around the circle are about six/seven doors. You open one of the doors and there is a space about the size of a closet which is filled with fantastical scenes that range from a DIY time machine to a miniscule fairy closet. You really get sucked into the scene.

When you are done with the Doorways, you enter a room that is 'the icing on the cake'.  There was so much detail that everywhere you looked, you saw something new.

I was going to call this next museum the highlight of OKC, but that was before I had been to the Cowboy Museum and Factory Obscura. This museum had it's own charm though. Of course I'm talking about the American Pigeon Museum. I had been wanting to go here for years, but it has very limited hours and it never seemed to work out. This year was it – I made it to the museum.

Most people consider pigeons to be rats with wings. This museum was out to change your mind. They talked, of course, about the contributions that pigeons made to society from dinner plates, to Armed Forces couriers to Pigeon Races. What I found most fascinating was all the different types of pigeons. Did you know that there is a breed of pigeon that has curly feathers? After you finish all the exhibits, you can go out back and see some of the different pigeon breeds.

Pretty bird

He seems sure of himself

Check out his feet

Evidently there is even a Pigeon Olympics

Cowboys and Indians

 

I made a mad dash across Arkansas, well, that was the plan, but I ended up in Russellville where a one-night stayed turned into a three night stay. I was right on the river and it was so peaceful, I felt that I needed to just stay and soak it all up.

A Foray Into The Hills of Oklahoma

After spending a week in the car lot, I need to do something. I'm so tired of just sitting around – time to do the tourist thang.

Saturday, I head over into Oklahoma – I'm only a couple of miles from the border, so it isn't that long of a journey. I drive about an hour and a half to Tahlequah which is the Cherokee National Capitol. There was a lot of interesting things about this place, but they became very near and dear to my heart when they told me that they were dog-friendly – not just the grounds, but Miko could come into the museum also. How cool is that? Or as my mechanic in the car lot where I am living now said to me – 'Cooler than a pocket on a shirt'. The museum itself told the story of the Trail of Tears, where the Cherokee and many other First Nation tribes were driven off their land in the eastern United States and forced to travel to Oklahoma 'Indian Territory'. It is one of the saddest stories of our nation's history. I wandered over to the Cherokee village which they have built. It is representative of a typical Cherokee village in the early 1700's. I took the tour which was fascinating as they talked a lot about the Cherokee culture and how they lived.

Miko in the museum

A Cherokee winter house made out of clay and river reeds

Major take-aways – the Cherokee were a Mater-lineal group where all property and children belonged to the women. They were not nomadic and built villages with stockade walls. Education was highly valued and they were often more literate than their white neighbors. There have been many notable Cherokee but Andrew Hartley Payne captured my imagination. He was the winner of the International Trans-Continental Footrace in 1928. He ran 3,423.5 mile route from Los Angeles to New York City from March or 1928 until May of 1928. Just a little over two months it took him to run across the United States. Amazing. There were so many amazing facts – I highly recommend checking out Tahlequah and the Cherokee National Museum. Alas, they have partnered with the National Park Service, but their Junior Ranger program has not been completely set up yet, so no Junior Ranger for me.

Sunday was a lovely day, temperatures were in the low sixties. Miko and I wandered over to Oklahoma again to go to Natural Falls State Park, home of one of the tallest waterfalls in Oklahoma. My first waterfall of the year – how wonderful it this? Everything is pretty brown - I suppose that is to be expected with it being January and all.  I think Miko really had a good time – she has been sort of cooped up at the car lot for the last week and it was really nice to get out and do some hiking. I spent quite a bit of time at the bottom of the falls, just sitting and becoming one with nature. I've always wanted to use that 'becoming one with nature' in a sentence about me.

This park had multiple different ways to view the falls - high, low and in between

I was just so thrilled to see green in the month of January I had to take this picture

I also did a bit of shopping, replenishing some supplies.  I bought a beaded placemat to hang on my wall - I think it is pretty.  So far I have not really put any personal touches in the RV.  It's a start.

Oklahoma City Treasures

Oklahoma City is going to be the city of museums for me. They have several really interesting museums and the plan is to check them out. I am a little bummed though because one of the museums I want to see is only open Friday and Saturday and I will be gone by then. That museum is the Pigeon Museum. A whole museum devoted to pigeons, I can only imagine.

First venue is the Oklahoma City Bombing National Memorial. I sort of had to force myself to go to this one – it is hard for a sensitive soul such as myself to go to places like this. There is a museum attached to the Memorial but I chose not to go through that one and instead opted for just walking the grounds. I was already choked up before I even got to the site so I knew it would not be pretty to be walking around sniffling. I thought the Memorial itself was very moving. It was very simple – a very shallow reflecting pool with gate structures on each end of the pool, one has the time 9:01 on it and the other has 9:03 on it. From the NPS website:

The 9:01 gate is a symbolic reference to the last minute of innocence for our nation in regards to domestic terrorism. The 9:03 gate is a symbolic reference to the first moment of recovery, the moment when grieving, and healing, began. The time of 9:02 a.m. stretches between the two, presenting a tragically long minute in which citizens were killed, survived and changed forever.

There are chairs arranged on the side of the reflecting pool, one for each victim, small ones for the children that were killed.

The chairs are arranged in nine rows, which represent the nine floors of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.Each chair, representing an individual's life, is placed on the row (or the floor) they would have worked on or were visiting at the time of the bombing. Within the row, chairs are grouped by agency and then in alphabetical order progressing from east to west.

The five chairs located on the western side of the field are positioned in a column. These chairs represent the five people who did not die within the federal building.

The chairs are also arranged to abstractly reflect the outline of the blast cavity of the Murrah Building, with the densest concentration of chairs reflecting the severest damage to the building.

Very somber place except for the middle school field trip participants who, with the exuberance of youth lent an air of renewal.

Onward to the Museum of Osteology – or the Bone Museum. The founder, when he was a small boy, found a coyote skull and this started his fascination with bones and skeletons. He started a business called Skulls Unlimited where he would take bones, clean them and sell them. As his business grew, so did his collection. Zoos started giving him carcasses, he would clean them and then put the skeletons back together and pretty soon he had a great collection and decided to start a museum. This was fascinating – he had a giraffe (same number of neck bones as humans), elephant, whales, rhinos, lots of monkeys and apes, humans, birds, reptiles – just about every type of animal was represented. There were also several videos around that would tell about his bone cleaning business. This videos were actual television shows such as Ripley's Believe It Or Not and The World's Dirtiest Jobs. The whole process can take many months depending on the size of the animal.

First you strip any remaining flesh off of the bones and then you let it dry for a few days. Then you take the bone and put it in his cadaver beetle farm. He has millions of beetles – these guys will strip any remaining soft material off of bones within 48 hours. The bones then get dumped into a vat of hydrogen peroxide which bleaches the bones white. After that comes the laborious job of putting the bones all together in it's proper skeletal form.

I thought this museum would be a little quirky, but it was fascinating looking at the skeletons and thinking about form and function. It was also interesting noticing the similarities in skeletons between all the different species.

A Chihuahua and a Great Dane



Snakes and Dragons



Giraffes, Elephants, Rhinos and Whales - Oh My

Next up is the Museum of Women Pilots. This museum is dedicated to women fliers and all the trials and tribulations they had to go through to get into the air. Everything from what does the well-dressed woman wear in the cockpit to all the sabotage they had to put in from men who felt threatened. Women started flying in the early 1900's. They had a fairly large Amelia Earhart exhibit, since she is probably one of the most famous women aviators in the world. I must admit, though, my favorite of all was a woman named Ruth Elder. In 1929, there was a long distance plane race for women that went from Santa Monica to Cleveland. It lasted nine days and was unofficially called the Powder Puff Derby. On day three, Ruth's map flew out of the cockpit, she got lost and landed in a bull pasture and got directions. On Day six, her map again flew out of the cockpit and she had to stop in a cow pasture and ask directions (these bovines must give good directions). On the last day, she again got lost and while she did finish the race eventually, she was quite late. Later, Ruth Elder went on to become a movie star.

They had a flight simulator that you could play in. Here is a picture of how I did.

 

Actually, I got sort of bored and decided I would end this simulation in a blaze of glory.

On to the Museum of Art in downtown OKC. The main reason I was going was because they had a Chihuly exhibit. There was some amazing pieces of glass work that I really enjoyed looking at.

 

Finally, it was time for the Banjo Museum. This was a quiet little museum although once you got inside, two whole floors of banjos. In talking to the admissions person, he said that many of today's current banjo players had been through here – Steve Martin, Dom Flemons, Alison Brown and spent hours. This museum was really well done – starting with early banjo playing in the early 1800s up through the jazz age when everybody played the banjo through the bluegrass era to current day when banjos have started to become popular again in contemporary music. There was only one other person going through the museum with me and he was a collector of Bacon/Day banjos. I hung out with him and it was quite an education as he explained tiny little details that I never would have noticed on my own. Who knew there was such a banjo counterculture. Some of these banjos were works of art.

Giant banjo - taller than me

Pretty Fancy Banjos



Wall to Wall Banjos

Watching Out for Tornadoes in Oklahoma

Left Christiandom and headed into Texas. For some reason(Ok, ok, it took me a long time to get going in the morning), the drive was really long.  I had miscalculated my time – I did not take into account that I was moving from Mountain Time into Central Time which meant I lost an hour which meant things got a little rushed because I was off to see a few sights which closed at 4:00.

The drive was pretty boring – it was what you normally think of when you think of driving across Texas – flat, nothing to see. I was on a secondary road which meant that I got to go through a few small towns which broke up the monotony a little bit although it was sort of depressing – there sure were a lot of broken down old buildings and trailers along the way. I don't know what people do here to make a living.

I took a right off of Highway 152, drove a few miles and the landscape changed dramatically. There were hills, there was dark red earth and lots of oil drills. I headed into the town of Borger – to their city park which is where I was camping. There were 10 sites, each with water and electricity hookups and the cost was........FREE. Only restriction is you couldn't stay more than three days. This city park was pretty amazing – ball fields, basketball courts, walking trails, horseshoes and an aviary. This aviary had some extraordinary birds – I wish I knew the names of them.

 

 

Once we got set up, Miko and I headed to Alibates Flint Quarries. We were too late to actually see the Quarries – you could only see them if you got a ranger to give you a tour. I watched the movie and then Miko and I headed over to Lake Meredith National Recreation Area. Miko and I hiked around the hills, the lake is pretty much dried up so the marina and boat launches were all closed. It sure is getting hot here down south – time to start heading north for sure.


That whole section to the left is lakebed

On Saturday we moved to another city park – this one in Sayre Oklahoma. These people down south really do their city parks up good. This park had RV camping with water and electricity for $12. They also had a golf course, tennis courts, ball courts, swimming pool, playgrounds – everything a park should have.

The Sayre City Park is about a half hour drive from the Washita National Battleground. I left Miko at home because it was too hot for her to wait in the car for me and she wasn't allowed anyways. The visitor center had an excellent half hour movie that explained what this battleground was all about.

There is a long sordid history of white European Americans moving into First Nation land and grabbing land that they considered their god given right irregardless of any treaties in place. Some of the First Nation people submitted and moved peacefully to the reservations but others such as the Cheyenne and Arapaho decided to defend their land and their freedom.

In the winter of 1868, General Custer found Black Kettle's village camped in a valley by the Washita River for the winter. He thought he had found a village of Cheyenne warriors but it was actually a village comprised mostly of women and children. At dawn Custer attacked and within twenty minutes had control of the camp. He killed forty natives and to his credit, when he heard that his men were slaughtering the women and children, he ordered the massacre halted and the women and children rounded up as prisoners of war. Interesting fact: The Cheyenne got him back at Little Big Horn.

I walked down the trail for a little ways but it was too hot to go very far. This trail was interesting because it had a really great trail guide. You would stop at a numbered pole and then it would say – Magpie(one of the survivors) ran to those two mounds that you see ahead of you. Or the hill that you see in front of you is probably where Custer stood and watched the battle.

Sunday is move day to Oklahoma City. I have taken my lucky arrowhead out of the plastic and am wearing it around my neck to ward off any sort of bad weather. I did not see any tornadoes on my trip but the winds were horrible. They were 38 mph coming from the north which meant that they were hitting my high profile RV and it was extremely difficult to keep on the road. I got a little scared so about twenty minutes into the trip, I pulled off into a gas station and decided to wait the wind out.The wind was so strong, it ripped my vent cover off it's track. The winds died down a little bit so I took off down the freeway. I put my flashers on and drove fifty mph in the seventy mph zone. It was sort of like Gilliagan's Island where they went out for an hour long boatride and then the winds came up and they were lost forever. It took me 4 ½ hours to go 120 miles.

I'm in an RV park – very crowded. I have full hookups and plan to stay here for a few days. I was reading another blogger and he said once, when he was planning on settling in and getting off the road for an small extended time that he was going to stay put and allow time to catch up to him. I feel sort of that way since I've been moving every day for the last four days.


Miko's favorite spot while I get the RV all set up at a campsite