We woke up on Thursday to about a foot of snow. We couldn’t let this stop us from making our trip, since we had booked a hotel on priceline and could not get a refund. We did wait until after rush hour and then started the drive. The hardest part was just getting out to Interstate 35, which would take us all the way to Oklahoma City. We eventually made it there around the middle of the afternoon, and quickly checked in to the hotel. From there we walked down to the memorial and walked around the outside. We got there just before sunset, and stuck around to see the lights come on throughout the various parts. We were too late to enter the inside museum, so that would have to wait until the next day.

From there we walked back over to the Bricktown area. We had dinner and drinks at Coach’s and then headed over to the Myriad Gardens to check out all of their Christmas light displays. After we were completely frozen we headed back into Bricktown and went to our second micro brewery of the night, Bricktown Brewery. The beers here were much better than at Coach’s, at least in our opinion. Not wanting the night to end there, we headed to one last bar, TapWerks and then called it a night.

We got up pretty early on Friday to go back to the memorial, this time to check out the inside museum. We had heard that you could walk through all of it in about an hour, but we found ourselves still on the first of two floors two hours after starting. There is so much to read and see inside that you could easily spend half of your day there. The entire memorial is very well done and truly an amazing thing to see. I’m not sure that my pictures of the outside will do it justice.

From there we made the hour or so drive down to the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge, the oldest refuge in the U.S. I found this place online before we left for Oklahoma, when searching for places to see buffalo in the wild. Sure enough we saw plenty of American bison (what is often called buffalo), sometimes they were only 10 feet or so from us. We also saw many longhorn cattle and a few rocky mountain elk. The bison and longhorns were not afraid of cars or people at all, but the elk were more like deer and would flee the instant they were spotted. Besides all of the wildlife, we also drove to the top of Mt. Scott, the third tallest mountain in Oklahoma. The scenery in the preserve is beautiful, I can only imagine what it would look like in some of the warmer months. We were both really glad that we made the drive down to the refuge.

After a few hours there we headed back to Oklahoma City and went to see the Blazers hockey team defeat the Fort Worth Brahmas pretty easily. It was one of those “we went to a fight and hockey game broke out” type of games, especially in the third period. It was nice to see a game this season, since I probably won’t see another one.

We then spent the rest of the night out at Bricktown. We tried to go to a place called Half-Time Sports Grill, but quickly left after a fight broke out. The hockey team must have made their way over to the same bar. :) We then made our way over to the Biting Sow, the only place to have live music seven days a week. It turned out to be a Blues Bar, but it was pretty entertaining for an hour or so. We finally ended up at City Walk, one of those megaplexes of bars where they try to offer something for everyone. After paying an $8 cover we made our way to the dueling piano bar, only to realize that no one else was there. It was nice being able to request every song we wanted to hear, but I think it cost us quite a chunk of change. I still haven’t found a place that compares to Crocodile Rocks down in Myrtle Beach.

We made the drive back to Kansas City on Saturday and spent the rest of the night watching movies. We watched Cinderella Man first, which we both enjoyed a bunch, and then Mr. & Mrs. Smith, which was okay. I fell asleep towards the end of the second, but I was pretty exhausted from all of the driving. Kim said that she had already seen the movie before, but couldn’t remember it, if that tells you anything about it.

Yesterday we did some more Christmas shopping and we now have just about everything done. We then went over to Doni & Phil’s so that the girls could make cookie baskets for their agents, while Phil and I watched the Chiefs blow it in the end. We later ate some Stroud’s, which ended the weekend well. Well I shouldn’t say it completely ended the weekend, since I did have a hockey game at 9PM last night. We won the game, even though one of our better players was playing for the other team. I scored the game winner! :)

My pictures from Oklahoma are up on the site. I’ll be adding some captions to them as the day goes on, but you can view them now if you’d like. I also updated my visited states map to include the 30th state, Oklahoma.

Oklahoma on Dwellable