Trip to Oklahoma – You’re Gonna Want to Go

Oklahoma gets a bad rap. I mentioned to my friends on Facebook that we were heading to Oklahoma for spring break and asked what the best things to do were in Oklahoma.  Real answers included:

• fly over it
• drive back to Texas

I have had one semi bad experience in Oklahoma but that was just the year that our church decided to go somewhere closer for summer youth camp and we wound up at a really old camp in Oklahoma during a heat wave. It wasn’t a great tip. But because of that one bad experience, I had pretty much stayed away from it.  Then something wonderful happened, The Pioneer Woman opened up a store and let visitors come visit The Lodge. So last summer my mother-in-law and my three girls took a girls trip to The Lodge and stopped at Chickasaw Nature Reserve on the way.  Let. Me. Tell. You…. I fell in love with this place where there’s no humidity (hello Houston) and there’s so many hidden natural elements that you just won’t believe it.  This summer we’re going to go check out Turner Falls and I really want to also jet over to the east a little and go back to Chickasaw Nature Preserve because that day was magical. So naturally when my mother-in-law asked what we wanted to do for spring break, we chose to go back and explore more of Oklahoma.  It did not disappoint. I am going to share more about this trip in the future, broken down into what you can also see while you’re there but in the interest of time, today I’m just going to share a snapshot with you. We’ll call it wetting your whistle because you’re gonna want to go. (By the way, I said I was just going to show a “snapshot” and then figured out I was editing 30 pictures – so I had to weed that down a little.) Let’s just start by explaining that this is normal life for me. One kid cheesing it up, one totally lost somewhere in a hoodie and most of the sitting on the actual table. BUT for those of you from South Texas let me just explain that those giant things in the background are called mountains. I know, I was shocked too! I truly think that Oklahoma has so many hidden nature gems that most people never explore and this is without a doubt one of them. We woke up early the first day of our trip and headed to the Wichita Mountains Nature Preserve. We thought it would be packed since it was spring break but we barely saw anyone else at all.  But look at this… It was so much fun to drive the roads and just stop on the side when we saw something we wanted to explore.  We did do one hike on a trail. I did not die. Thought I would. It was close.  There are so many wonderful things I want to tell you about this place but it will have to wait until you have a few hours and I have more bandwidth for the 100+ pictures I took. After we were so tired that we could barely stand, we got in the car and drove and hour and a half to Oklahoma City.   The next day we started with the Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum. There’s just not enough words to express how amazing it was.  It was a bit much for my 8 year old so my extremely sweet mother-in-law took her out of the museum while the rest of us went through it.  She bought my daughter a white teddy bear to help calm her down, which wound up becoming the trip mascot.  Next we walked to Myriad Botanical Gardens which is my dream come true. If you don’t know, I kill everything I grow. This time I just had to walk into a building which looked like this on the outside…. And on the inside it looks like this… and this…. So far no one has called to say that everything died right after I left and I’m never invited back so it looks like we’re good to go visit it again.  After that we walked down to Bricktown and along the canal, all the way to the Land Rush Memorial which I had read about online and thought it wouldn’t really be all that great. I was wrong. I did see two really strange things while in Bricktown.  I give you… #1 and… #2. I have no clue.  Finally on the last day we woke up and went to see the Dale Chihuly exhibit at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.  It was magnificent. I could show you every picture I took but it just would not do it justice. Plus I took 3 kids and myself through the exhibit and nothing got broken (well almost a hip but not glass).  While we were there, my whole family was sitting on a long bench that had slender tiny legs mainly toward the middle of the bench. Of course coming from Houston I thought the bench was bolted to the ground! Everyone in my family except for myself got up at one time and I went flying off the bench and the bench went flying into the air. It probably looked like the circus act where everyone jumps on one side of a board at one time and the person on the other end goes flying into the air.  Yes… that was me. If that museum ever opens up a Bobbie Byrd wing, you know it was because the security footage went viral and made them a couple million. And because you can’t drive home from a long trip without coffee, we found this double decker bus that was turned into a coffee shop!  Once you got your coffee you could go upstairs and sit down or hang out with friends.  It truly was a magical trip. If someone tells you that a city or state isn’t worth exploring, they’re wrong and it only means that you need to get there faster.  Go visit the wilderness of Oklahoma and then spend a few days in Oklahoma City, you won’t regret it.