Wandering West Travel Day 1
Now you’re singing the song aren’t you (well, if you were born before 1985)? Today was launch day for our next adventure. We’ve been planning for a year, now we’re finally on the road, headed west! Seventeen days, seventeen people, three campers, two follow cars, and a whole lotta miles.
We left out of Hot Springs (ok Hempwallace Kevin), at around 6:30 this morning. We left with the intention of making it to Amarillo, TX but instead, we stopped about 60 miles east of there. That’s ok though because we had an unexpected adventure leading up to it. Our goal on this trip is to see the “big attractions”, ie the Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam, Yosemite, etc, but then see as much as we can in between those stops. So, today when someone said “Have you ever seen the Oklahoma City Memorial and Museum?”, the group said, “Let’s go check that out!”. It was well worth the stop.
We hit OKC at around 1:30. We had already refueled both our bellies and our tanks so we were ready to stretch our legs and see something. Lucky for us there is a Bass Pro Shop in downtown OKC, which meant plenty of room to park the campers. Then, even better, OKC has a streetcar system that runs right by it. So, we all hopped the streetcar and off we went. I must say, downtown OKC itself was pretty cool. We saw the ballpark where their minor league baseball team plays and we saw the arena that the OK Thunder play in. We even saw the OKC thunder mascot outside the arena though I did not envy him in that costume in the 100 degree heat. Of course we had stopped here to see the memorial to the OKC bombing that occurred in 1995. It was a great history lesson for our kids, none of whom knew anything about it, and it was a very moving tribute to the victims of that attack. Well worth the stop off.
We finished up our sightseeing in OKC and it the road again by around 4pm. We still had every intention of making it to Amarillo tonight but about an hour into the drive the dads were ready for a break. So, the research began to find a place to park our homes for the night. Thanks to Google we found a little treasure in the middle of nowhere about an hour before Amarillo, Longhorn RV Park in Alanreed, TX. We really pulled in here just because the Google reviews said it was a quiet, quaint, clean park ran by an older couple who live on site. What they left out was that it literally sits on the old Route 66. There is an old, abandoned Route 66 gas station next door and the oldest standing church on Route 66 right across the street. The owners of the RV park were so kind and they let us go in and tour the church. Services have not been held there in about 15 years and it was left just as it was when they closed the doors. Bibles still in pews and everything. That was a pretty cool experience.
This evening the kids have been riding bikes along Route 66, we’ve been checking out the amazing views of the vast “nothingness” behind us, and we even met a couple from Florida who have been on the road for a month in their Airstream and are headed back home now.
We could not have asked for a better day.
