Author: amazingmrd

June 5, 2017

With apologies to the Black Panther movie franchise….

Today was a travel day and I headed out early to head northeast towards Bartlesville.  I had seen big signs promoting the Luck Star Casino and it’s huge payouts to patrons.  I was quite surprised to find this:

Not exactly the opulent excess I was expecting…   And even though this was facing the road I was on I thought maybe it was the back of the casino so I went into the parking lot and drove around to the other side.

Wrong….

This post creates a dilemma.  These images are labeled to indicate I took them on June 5 at 812am.  In researching this post, however, I see that the Lucky Star Casino locations are all west of Oklahoma City, including the one in Watonga (and to their defense, most of their locations are more opulent than this).

I don’t remember exactly where I took these photos, or the exact route I took up to Bartlesville.  I can’t think why I would have backtracked to Watonga (or El Reno, their location closest to OKC).  Perhaps this was a temporary location further east which has since been abandoned.  Nonetheless, I found this an interesting conflict with my usual image of casinos….

June 5, 2017

I traveled to Bartlesville, in northeast Oklahoma, for one reason – to spend the night.  Specifically to spend the night in Price Tower.

(Photo credit: mapsofworld.com)

When I visited the home of Walmart headquarters in northwest Arkansas earlier in this trip I picked up maps and brochures for the area, one of which mentioned Price Tower.  Price Tower was designed by renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright.  Those of you who have followed this blog for the past two years know of my mild obsession with Mr. Wright’s work.

Harold Price commissioned Mr. Wright to design an office building for his oil pipeline and chemical business based in Bartlesville.  Mr. Wright designed this 19-story tower.

The significance of the “66” in the first building photo is that Bartlesville was also the corporate headquarters for Phillips Petroleum, whose gasoline brand was Phillips 66 (a reference to Route 66).

I learned that Price Tower was subsequently sold to Phillips (which seems to own just about everything in Bartlesville) and a portion of it is now a hotel.  I broke my routine of staying primarily in Airbnb’s during my trips and booked a night here.

I stayed on the 8th floor and after checking in, took the elevator up to my floor.  This was, by far, the smallest elevator I have ever been in.  The only way I could think to convey this in a photo was to take a picture of my feet.

I didn’t check the “Cherie Berry” certificate to see what the maximum occupancy was but it can’t have been more than 3 or 4.  For those of you not living in North Carolina, that is a reference to our long-time Labor Secretary whose photo is in every elevator in the state (her department inspects elevators for safety and issues certificates with her photo and signature).

The common area to the hotels rooms on the 8th floor wasn’t exactly spacious either.

The room itself was nice.  An odd shape due to the footprint of the building, but well used space.

There was a large book on the desk in the room which explained the history of the building and included lots of photographs of it’s construction and how it appeared back in the day.  The building now has an art museum on the lower floors (I’d be leaving in the morning before they would be open), several floors of hotel rooms and several floors of offices.

This was the view from my room:

There is a restaurant and bar on the top floor but it was not open the one night of the week I happened to be there.  I was also very disappointed to find that another restaurant in town which has an excellent reputation, Murphy’s Original Steak House, was also closed, the sign on the door indicating that the closure was only temporary.  I walked around downtown in the early evening and ending up having a few slices of pizza.

 

June 5, 2017

Today was a travel day as I’d say goodbye to Oklahoma City and drive about 2 1/2 hours northeast to the town of Bartlesville.  I could have taken the dreaded interstate and gone through Tulsa but saw on my map a road racing course I have heard of and decided to take some smaller roads and check it out.  I was in for a pleasant and totally unexpected surprise.

My GPS actually took me on a series of small roads right to the track, out in the boonies.  I saw a police car coming towards me from the other direction as I was approaching the entrance and it turned in towards the track as well.  I thought perhaps there had been a burglary or something as it was a Monday and I wouldn’t have expected there to be any racing taking place.  In fact I wasn’t even sure if the facility was still in use or be open.

Well, not only was it open but I almost drove across a “Hot” (in use) track….

The gate on the small entrance road was open and just before I would have crossed the racing surface to get into the infield two cars came screaming by, on the track!  I backed off to a safe place and got out of my car to observe.

If you look closely at the photo above you’ll see a white car on the left and a dark blue car in the center of the picture, just to the left of the open white gate.

Yes, those are police cars…

Lots of police cars….

After a while someone who works at the track drove out in a golf cart to see what I was up to.  He said it was perfectly fine for me to stay where I was and watch.  I suggested that they close the gate, or at least put a sign up advising people to stop before crossing the track.  Understandably since the track is so remote they really don’t get many “drop-ins”.

He explained that what I was seeing was official, high-speed training for Tulsa police officers.  They use this facility periodically to simulate high-speed pursuits in all conditions (day and night, in rain and snow and dry conditions).  I wasn’t in any particular hurry so I hung out for a while to watch.  At times they actually pursued a blue chase car, driven by a professional race instructor.  Sometimes the police cars turned on their lights and sirens to simulate the actual conditions for which they were training.

When I finally decided I had seen enough I caught this scene as I approached a bridge which passes over the highway the police were using to get to the facility.

All of those are Tulsa police cars (and more to the left of my road, getting off the exit ramp).  I guess maybe today would be a good day to rob a bank in Tulsa!

I didn’t.

If you had asked me before I left Oklahoma City this morning what I would have been seeing today, this wouldn’t have been on the list.

 

 

June 4, 2017

My final full day in Oklahoma City I drove out to Tinker AFB, east of town.  They do not have a Visitor Center but did have a display of aircraft outside the Main Gate.

And a B-1 Bomber – too big to fit in one photo:

 

 

 

 

June 3, 2017

After visiting the National Weather Center down in Norman and the OKC Memorial downtown I went to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art for a while (some pictures in a post below, although this trip was pre-blog so I didn’t take as many pictures as I often do).  Next stop on this busy day was the Myriad Botanical Garden, a 17 acre oasis in the heart of downtown Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.  Here are some of the things I saw there:

The photo above is the middle portion of a very tall “Zombie Palm”

June 3, 2017

Here are more of the things I saw at the Myriad Botanical Garden, a 17 acre oasis in the heart of downtown Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

My, what a cute little blue frog….

Oh!…..

June 2, 2017

The next stop on my first full day in OKC was the site of the former Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, located in the heart of downtown.

This was the location of a domestic terrorist attack on April 19, 1995 when two men blew the front off the 9-story federal office building using a powerful bomb.

Although the bombing occurred more than 22 years before I was there, there are still numerous items placed at the site by family members and others who will never forget what happened that day.

The memorial itself is located in the footprint of where that building once stood.

A chair, each representing one of the 168 people killed in the initial explosion (or the resulting collapse of the front portion of the building).  The chairs are aligned in 9 rows, representing the floor on which each person was thought to be at the time of the explosion, 9:02 am local time.

At one end of the reflecting pond is a black structure containing only the time – 9:01, the minute before the explosion.

At the other end, a similar structure with 9:03, the minute after.

I am normally not a very emotional person and I was doing fairly well until I saw this:

One of the shorter chairs, one for each of the 19 children who died in the attack, each with a teddy bear strapped to it.  Most of the children were at a day care center located in the building.

A powerful message (and I’m tearing up again as I post this).

The clear “box” under each chair is lit up at night.

 

June 3, 2017

(Photo credit: ontheworldmap.com)

My first stop on my first full day in the Oklahoma City area was to travel south, about 20 miles, to the town of Norman (at the bottom of the map above).  Here I would visit the National Weather Center.

 

Surprise, surprise – I am a total Weather Channel geek (although I can’t receive it under my current media configuration at home).  While TWC is located in Atlanta, they often reference the “Storm Prediction Center” at the National Weather Center here in Norman.

The National Weather Center, located on the campus of University of Oklahoma, is a joint effort between them, the National Weather Service and NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

I couldn’t take a tour (I believe they only do them on certain days, plus I hadn’t signed up in advance and “walk-in” tours are not permitted) but Security did let me inside the building, restricting my access to a common area on the ground floor.  I was here on a Saturday and most of the staff wouldn’t be working, plus there was an art exhibit which I could walk through.

I did see these examples of tornado monitoring devices:

And I chuckled to myself when I saw the name of the coffee shop, located on the ground floor:

The name is reference to the movie “Twister”.  And I swear to God this is true – when I got back to my Airbnb that night “Twister” was showing on one of the cable channels I could receive!  I caught it just in time to see the “flying cow” scene.

Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction….

 

 

 

June 2, 2017

Today was another travel day, even longer than the day before.  After my one night stopover in Lubbock I set out for my next stay, 3 nights in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.  MapQuest said it could be a trip of about 6 hours covering 380 miles but I took more of a zig-zag route, largely on slower, scenic roads, and I put a total of 605 miles on the car for the day.

Oklahoma City is pretty much right in the middle of the state (if you don’t include the panhandle):

(Photo credit: mapsofworld.com)

I embarked from Lubbock, in the lower left hand corner of the photo above – about where the word Copyright is.  I drove east and then north on a series of scenic roads which were already on my itinerary but were also recommended by my Airbnb host in Lubbock.  I picked up Interstate 40 east of Amarillo, TX and drove east as far as Elk City, OK (on the map above).

I stopped briefly at the National Route 66 Museum in Elk City, then drove south on scenic roads towards Altus and east towards Lawton.  Before I got to Lawton I drive through a National Wildlife Reserve and saw these characters:

Turns out that wouldn’t be the only warning sign I’d see.  Shortly after exiting the Wildlife Reserve and before getting to Lawton I passed by Fort Sill military base.  A friend back home in Durham had warned me I might see a sign like this:

(Photo credit: army.mil)

I didn’t stop to take a picture of the actual sign I saw but I did take the proactive step of closing my sunroof!

When I got to Lawton I headed north again on more small roads and approached Oklahoma City near where I’d be staying at an Airbnb on the southwest side of town.

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I’m going to skip ahead to something I did the next day.  Among the many things I did while in Oklahoma City was visit the Oklahoma City Museum of Art downtown.  There was a large Dale Chihuly exhibit there (apparently part of their permanent collection as it is still there).  I have posted pictures of Mr. Chihuly’s work before but do want to post just a few here:

This is the Eleanor Blake Kirkpatrick Memorial Tower, located in the atrium inside the museum entrance.  It rises 55 feet, contains 2,100 pieces of glass, weighs 10 tons and is lit up at night:

And here are two other works, a little different from what I have posted previously:

The photo above is of a chandelier, photographed from the balcony on the next floor.

And finally a shot of a modern building downtown, taken from the rooftop patio at the museum.

June 1, 2017

Today was a travel day as I drove over 200 miles from Carlsbad, New Mexico northeast to Lubbock, Texas.  Lubbock was chosen as a one-night stopping point because I had some chores to do once I got there (having the tires on the car rotated, doing laundry, etc.) and I was going to have a much longer drive the following day as I moved on to Oklahoma City so I wanted to rest up a bit.

I did find something fun to do while I was in town.  I visited this museum, the largest one in the world dedicated to windmills.  This beautiful facility has over 160 windmills, 60 outdoors and the remainder inside a new building.