Friday, 9th September - Oklahoma

The main purpose of a two night stop in Oklahoma was to enable one of our travelling companions, Jan, to visit the US National Pigeon Museum (it is only open a couple of days a week so the fulcrum of the entire trip was around this visit!).

In the morning we wandered down to the revitalised "Bricktown" area of Oklahoma City. This was a largely abandoned industrial area that was converted into a leisure and entertainment park in the late 1990s/early 2000s. We took a gentle water taxi ride through the development.

The "captain" of our boat gave a superb presentation on the history of Oklahoma itself and the "land rushes" of the late 1800s when, at the time, only 7 people actually resided in what is now Oklahoma City! The picture immediately above shows the Devon Tower in thc distance - the tallest skyscraper in the state, 71st tallest in the US, and designed to look like a drill bit on an oil platform.

Oklahoma features many beautiful murals, as in fact many of the towns and cities along our journey do.

In the afternoon, having dropped Jan off at the Pigeon Museum, we visited the Oklahoma City National Memorial built in memory of the 168 victims of the Alfred P Murragh Federal Building in 1995. 


Each of the chairs on the lawn to the right in the picture above represents a victim (19 of whom were children). In the words of the security guard that we chatted with, "Timothy McVeigh (the bomber) got the needle" in 2001. His handiwork, a 5000lb homemade bomb, injured 680 people, damaged 86 cars and 324 buildings in a 16 block radius in addition to the death toll. The single biggest act of domestic terrorism in the US.

A short walk from the memorial is the Automobile Alley - a brave attempt by the city to revitalise another area of decline that formerly featured lots of auto dealers back in the day. Work in progress ....

Tomorrow it's Texas. 

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