Day 2 - Oklahoma City

 This morning we grabbed a quick breakfast, got a few extra snuggles in with Lucy the kitty, and said our goodbyes. We headed to the Overland Park Arboretum for a little geocaching. The Arboretum was absolutely beautiful and we enjoyed the cool morning to walk the paths and explore the vegetation.

 Unfortunately, the GPS units to geocache were down, so that was a bummer, but we had fun checking out the trains, the Children’s Discovery Garden, the pond (and all of the friendly turtles), and the Medicine Wheel. 

Maragaret's pond was Norah's favorite as she loved all the turtles that kept saying hi to her. 

There were beautiful paths around every corner.

The Cohen Iris Garden was my favorite, but the girls loved catching all the tiny frogs along our paths as we wound through the gardens. 

The trains were awesome, but we were a little early for the miniature train exhibit to start running. 

Emma was a big fan of the Medicine Wheel. You leave all of your metal at the east entrance, enter into the circle and choose a rock on the outside and walk it into the inside leaving it as a gift with all of your prayers.

After a few hours, we loaded up and headed to Tulsa.

Our route to Tulsa detoured a bit so we could include the Historic Route 66 along Ribbon Road, the last original section of Route 66’s “sidewalk” highway. We stopped off at a historic Phillips 66 in Baxter Springs to absorb a little history before we let the miles disappear under our tires as we wound our way down this 9 foot wide section of the original Route 66. 

This part of the road was built before Route 66 was even named so it was awesome to think we were driving down one of the first highways ever built in the US. 

You can still see the original side markers separating the road from the shoulder. After this stretch, it was back to the Will Rogers Highway to Tulsa. 

Of course, we stopped in Tulsa to visit the Golden driller (a 75 ft 43,500 lb statue of an oil worker and 5^th tallest statue in the US).

We also had to see the infamous Cave Home in Tulsa and the “Center of the Universe.” Built in the 80’s after part of the bridge was rebuilt after a fire, the center circle has acoustic anomalies that can’t be explained. When you stand inside the circle and make a noise, the noise echoed back is heard much louder than the original one, but is inaudible to anyone standing outside the circle. Some believe it is the vortex where all the cosmic energies meet. For us, it was just a really cool physics experiment. *Occupational hazard when your mom is a teacher, I guess.*

After a good leg stretch and science lesson we hopped in the car and headed to Oklahoma City. Our first stop was the Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum. Though a bit expensive for a family, the inside Memorial is a must to better understand and appreciate the outdoor Memorial. It may be one of the most incredible museums I have ever visited. The touchscreens were helpful for the girls and much of it was in video form so Norah could appreciate it without us having to read all of the plaques to her. It was an extremely somber experience and the girls just kept asking, “a guy really killed 168 people?” “How could someone do all of this?” Being no stranger to loss this year, it really hit home for the older girls that people lost their loved ones in such a senseless act. 

After the museum we visited the survivor tree, the reflection pool and the remaining walls of the Murrah building. It is a beautifully created memorial site and our most memorable part of this trip yet. On the lawn there are chairs corresponding to the floor and place where each person who was killed was located during the attack. The second floor is one of the hardest to look at as the chairs there are smaller, for the children who died that day as the daycare was on the second floor. 

We then checked into our hotel, had a little dinner at Pizza 9 and went back to the hotel to swim. It was a balmy night in Oklahoma City and the water felt so good that none of us wanted the day to end. However, the darkness came and we had to get out of the pool so we closed down another fantastic day.