Road trip day 2—basic stats:
- Start time: 9am
- Distance covered: ~285 miles
- States: Missouri, Oklahoma
For those who are keeping track, that’s about half the distance covered on day 1, and also about half of what my husband originally thought we’d cover. It’s about two-thirds the distance I initially planned on, but the day was worth the slowdown.
Waking up in Springfield, Mo., we lit out on Route 44, the interstate that roughly follows the path of old Route 66. Missouri gave us beautiful, forested scenery, but our first stop was in Vinita, Okla., for a stretch of the legs and pie at Clanton’s Cafe. We can recommend the coconut cream and lemon meringue.
Our next stop brought us straight into the heartland of…well, one person’s kitsch is another’s Americana. Let’s just say that Ed Galloway’s Totem Pole Park is somewhere on the spectrum. Located outside Foyil, Okla., it’s a small park dotted with handmade concrete totem poles, including the world’s tallest, standing 90 feet tall. It’s impressive. And you may laugh, but this place is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, so the laugh will be on you.
We spent a little time walking around, then hit the gift shop for a postcard and ended up having a nice conversation with the lady working there, who told us what she knew about Ed himself and the very large collection of handmade fiddles on display (but not on sale) in the store. Saying “How’re you doing?” to a couple headed into the park as we were leaving, we got our first “Fur t’ middlin'” answer. Welcome to Oklahoma.
We had chosen the totem pole park over the great Blue Whale of Catoosa, Okla., but as we headed west toward Tulsa we were thrilled to find ourselves driving right past the whale. You can’t miss it on your right as you’re headed westbound. If we had needed to stretch our legs again, it would have been a handy stop for pictures, but we didn’t. So no pictures. Also no pictures of the nearby steel bridges crossing the Verdigris River, which snuck up on us. I regret not knowing about and planning to stop for these; they were gorgeous and surprising, but traffic was moving along quickly, and there didn’t seem to be a safe way to make a sudden stop to get out and appreciate them. If there’s a next time…definitely
I’ve heard that there’s some really lovely architecture in Tulsa. I wanted to see it, but honestly there just wasn’t time. It was either going to be that or the Murrah Federal Building bombing site in Oklahoma City, and this time architecture lost out. So we blew right on past Tulsa. But we had one more must-see stop before Oklahoma City: Pops 66 Soda Ranch in Arcadia, Okla., home of the giant soda bottle sculpture and literally hundreds of different kinds of soda for sale. We got there in the afternoon, so we couldn’t see the bright neon light show of the soda bottle sculpture. But neither that nor a little rain could stop us from taking our picture with the bottle or sitting down for lunch and soda. I chose locally bottled Round Barn root beer, commemorating the round barn we had driven past just a couple of miles down the road, apparently the only round barn in Oklahoma.
That was a pretty full day, but we still had the bombing site to visit. So after checking into our hotel and waiting out whatever Oklahoma City calls rush hour, we headed downtown. The on-site museum was closed, but the memorial itself is an outdoor park, open anytime. It’s a solemn place and a lovely one. Grass and trees, a reflecting pool, remnants of the Murrah building’s foundation, empty chairs representing each of those killed in the bombing. There’s a tree that miraculously survived the bombing, and it has been incorporated into the memorial, as has a section of the retaining fence that kept people off the site during the memorial’s construction and became an ad hoc shrine of memorabilia left to honor the victims. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.
