Oklahoma City

Back to doing this blog in chronological order...

I had only a short time in Oklahoma City, which was my first stop after Little Rock.  From the start of the trip, the whole middle of the country was a pain to plan.  In order to visit Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and Kansas City, Missouri, I would have to backtrack somewhere, either on my way out west or on my way back east.  I managed to make it work out on the way from Arkansas to Colorado, but my map is kind of a zig-zag.  That's OK, I'm not really in a hurry.

At the Cowboy Museum (statue modeled after an original by Frederic Remington).

But making Oklahoma harder to add to the mix was its lack of much to do outside of Oklahoma City.  Oh, and Tulsa, but I've been told that the entire staff of the National Trust for Historic Preservation all hate the city.  Maybe it's all that cheap 1970's facade covering up the 1880s brick storefronts?  Doesn't matter ... I avoided Tulsa and went to Oklahoma City instead.

One of the treats of Oklahoma City, which would have gotten me to visit anyway, was the presense of two more friends from the World of Warcraft:  Mitchell (aka Etch) and Chrissy (aka Aconyte).  Like most other Warcraft friends I've seen along the way, I had not met them before, but in a way I had.  The three of us went out to dinner in a downtown neighborhood (well, I guess it's downtown) called Bricktown.  The Bricktown Brewery, which isn't the kind of place I'd pick for myself -- it's kind of big and it appears as if it was designed to please crowds by being bland.  But it was quite tasty!  (So good pick, Mitch and Chrissy.)  That neighborhood has several restaurants and bars, and a canal/park area to walk through.  My guess it it gets a lot of people at dinner time and during events at the nearby stadium, but might be pretty quiet a lot of other times.  Even on a Saturday night, it was pretty easy to get around and parking wasn't too much of a pain.  I'd say that was true for all of the parts of Oklahoma City that I saw (which, admittedly, were few):  Pretty nice and easy to get around.

Chrissy & Mitchell in Bricktown

The "thing" that I saw in Oklahoma City was the Cowboy Museum.  I expected one of those small-town museums with hand-written descriptions and folksy stories about the area.  But it was quite large and professional and had a whole lot of stuff.  Much of the museum is devoted to art celebrating the cowboy.  I only let my eyes scan most of that, as I was more interested in learning about cowboys themselves.  Well, this museum has all of that:  What they wore, where they worked, how they branded and roped cattle, their saddles and other horsey items (argh, I went to horse camp when I was a kid and don't remember what half that stuff is called!).  The museum also has a huge collection of barbed wire.  Did you know there are over 1,300 kinds?  Now you do.

So you know how I like it when I learn how one place I've visited is related to other places.  Well, this one's tenuous, but one of the cowboy suits the museum had on display (a 20th Century piece) was designed by Nudie Cohn, who also designed Elvis's famous gold lame' suit!  I'd never heard of Nudie before visiting Graceland, so I felt pretty smart when I saw him listed as the designer of some more, um... respectable clothes.

Well... semi-respectable.