Oklahoma City

This is going to be a pretty long post as we did a lot of things all in one day...so bear with me, please.

Oklahoma City is a surprisingly fun city! We came here to visit friends we met while camphosting in Colorado. Two of the gentlemen are retired Oklahoma City firefighters so Jim has had a great time swapping stories. We went to the Oklahoma Firefighters Museum, which is the only museum run entirely by firefighters. It is an awesome place with wonderfully kept exhibits inside and a memorial park outside. This back wall is a hand painted mural that took a whole year to paint

The museum has the largest fire department uniform patches on public display. It is the personal collection of Retired Fire Chief Ben Dancy. The back and side walls are covered with these display cases of patches. We were happy to see that the San Luis Valley Firefighters Association patch was among them. It is on the first row, fourth from the left.

Their memorial park is very moving and thought-provoking.


These last pictures are of a large bronze sculpture which depicts a burned out wooden building with a firefighter on the roof, holding on to a brother firefighter to keep him from falling. The granite wall in front is etched with the names of fallen Oklahoma firefighters.

Then we went to the Oklahoma National Monument. Talk about sobering...it takes your breathe away. Photos I have seen made me think this was a large area and it is not. The building was along the side of a street. The pond is where the street ran. They left a little side piece of the building. The "chair" sculptures/pieces of art gave me a very eery feeling. The base of the chairs are plastic and light up at night. The chair plastic base is engraved with the name of a person who died. The smaller chairs represented a child...there were many small chairs. The water on the pond comes right up to the lip so it looks like it would overflow. At one end is a wall with only a large "9:01" on it, which the brochure says shows when life was normal. The other end of the pond shows a wall with "9:03", when life will never be the same. The chair rows represent which floor the people were on when they died. The first row was the first floor; the second row the second floor, etc.

That evening Charlie, Dawna and son Trent Ramirez took us to Bricktown in downtown Oklahoma City. It was in the warehouse district that had basically been abandoned and unused, that has been made into an entertainment center with canals, water taxies,much like The River Walk in San Antonio. There are restaurants on the edge of the canal, outdoor music venues, shops, etc. The photo with the horses is actually a series of huge life-size bronze sculptures depicting the Oklahoma land rush.

We met up with our other camper friends, Barbara and Don Stubblefield, Joanne and Frank DeVos, and ate at Earl's Barbeque. Earl use to be Elvis's cook...it was mighty fine.

We had a wonderful time with these dear friends and they spoiled us royally. Since Coffeyville is only about 3.5 hours from Oklahoma City, we plan on visiting them again during the next 3 months.