Got back to Hotel Kiwi at midnight last night. Jeff worked today but I
decided a day for re-entry would be prudent and go back to work tomorrow.
The previous blog was written in or near Little Rock, Arkansas. We left Little Rock Thursday morning and had
lunch with a friend in Russelville, AR, a town about an hour or so west of
Little Rock. A nice lunch at a restaurant
in and next to a train car, that even had a train whistle with a chain to pull
(which Jeff did). It was fun connecting
with a local cacher. After lunch we
found a couple of caches and then headed west.
At one point a few raindrops fell, within just a few seconds it was
absolutely pouring, and a few minutes later it was hailing. After seeing lots of cars pulling to the side
of the interstate to stop we decided to do the same…..when in Rome…. The hail stopped in a few minutes and we
continued to Oklahoma City, making sure to grab a couple of Oklahoma caches on
the way.
We’d hoped to connect with my cousin for dinner but she was
under the weather so we postponed until Friday.
After a quick but tasty Mongolian Grill dinner we wanted to go to a
grocery store. Seemed the nearby choices were
Target or Walmart, so we chose the former.
Friday was the day we toured Oklahoma City. We started at the capitol which we’d been
encouraged to visit because of the geocache there (GCVVRH) and were glad we
did. Then we went downtown and to a
trendy area called Bricktown for lunch and a long walk that included finding a
number of virtuals, including 2 near the Alfred Murrah Federal Building that
had been bombed in 1995. It was rather
warm and the $.96 (including tax) to get a slushy from Sonic was an excellent
investment! We decided to be extremely
touristy and took a boat ride along a canal in a recently gentrified area.
When we got back to the hotel we were greeted with a flyer
describing the anticipated “severe weather” that suggested a local news station
and also informed us which part of the hotel building was safest in case of a
tornado. Toto, we’re not in Kansas
anymore….or rather we’re too close to Kansas.
We met my cousin at her house, which interestingly enough
has the same # as our mutual grandmother’s zip code (15905). We drove across town to a local institution,
Cattlemen’s Steakhouse, where we had the pleasant surprise of being joined by
another cousin (the younger sister of the one I’ve been in contact with). A very pleasant meal, which concluded with a
picture of the 3 cousins. My cousin wasn’t
feeling great, but we made plans to connect for a late lunch on Saturday.
Saturday morning we discussed whether to switch hotels to be
closer to the airport and perhaps return the rental car so if it got dented by
hail or damaged by wind we wouldn’t be responsible. Eventually we decided to do it. After packing up, we drove all over town to
grab a few caches. The best cache was in
a mountain bike and hiking trail area where we walked slightly less than a mile
round trip to get the cache. We passed
Tinker Air Force Base to get there and were amused at the Interstate exit which
offered 3 gates – Lancer, Liberator, and Marauder – and we were amused at the
latter name. The most memorable cache was the one where Jeff got to see
about a dozen turtles go from grass into a pond – I’d been searching nearby and
got to see them swimming but not the entry.
We also saw a mother duck and over a dozen ducklings.
Meanwhile we’d been texting back and forth
with my cousin whose health situation had worsened so we cancelled lunch but did
stop by her house to take her some pho and visit for a bit. Bummer that we didn’t get to see much of her,
but there’s a good chance she and I will have a weekend together this fall in
Dallas (after a conference I expect to attend).
Checked into the hotel, located but did not sign the parking
lot cache (in case the severe weather continued into Sunday), set up a camera
to take pictures of lightning, and ventured off to dinner. We found another flinging knives location and
then returned to the hotel where Jeff watched anime and I was able to watch the
Thorns home opener over the internet. It
turned out that most of the severe weather missed us, though looking back a
couple of days later we’re grateful that we weren’t in Arkansas for the
tornados they had.
Sunday we cached in the morning. We got several texts about our first flight
being delayed by 30, 45, and then 60 minutes (it became 90 minutes while we
were at the airport). So instead of a
leisurely 2.5 hours in Denver between flights to eat dinner we stopped by a
Subway to grab sandwiches and made plans to run through the Denver airport if
need be (it wasn’t, though we did walk quickly and ultimately reached our gate
before boarding started). Impressively
enough, our luggage also made the flight.
It was a fine trip to the land of y’all. And now that we have caches in all 50 states
it’s time to consider the next “project.”
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