Wendy has wanted to see the immense municipal rose garden at Tyler, Texas for many years. Since Fall Break coincided with the annual Texas Rose Festival, we went to enjoy the parade as well as the gardens. There were floats, marching bands, crazy Shriners, and more. Enjoy the slideshow!
Texas Rose Festival Parade (click image for slideshow)
Wendy and I began our Fall Break 2013 on Thursday with lunch with my folks in Oklahoma City and then a leisurely drive south down old Highway 77 through Norman, Noble, Purcell, Wayne, Paoli (where we stopped at the graveyard where my maternal grandparents and an aunt are buried), Pauls Valley (we arrived too late to enter the Action Figure Museum, darn it), Wynnewood, Davis, and finally reached our destination for the evening: Sulphur.
Lincoln Bridge (click image for slideshow)
Our first stop in Sulphur was where I always take first-time visitors to the town: the stinky Vendome Well, which has been spewing sulphur water up out of the ground since 1922. Wendy refused to drink any of the “medicinal water” and I regretted the brief splash I took across my tongue, but we enjoyed walking in the old Flower Garden area over to Lincoln Bridge, where we admired the stream and nearby waterfall. Then we made our way over to Broadway and 1st Street where the new Artesian Hotel anchors the park’s main entrance.
The Artesian
The Artesian is a new version of the historic hotel which operated here from 1906 until it burned in 1962. Developed by the Chickasaw Nation, it sports a beautiful interior extending from the lobby through all of the floors and rooms, including the glamorous Hollywood Suite I’d reserved for us by phone for less than $200 on a weeknight, a great deal on a very nice room. (Come on, Chickasaws! Get your online booking working for this great hotel!)
The hotel’s Springs restaurant served a great dinner, and the Hollywood Suite has a dining area and sitting room, bedroom, and enormous bathroom with glittering tiles, a two-person jacuzzi tub, and glass-walled shower. Wendy and I were more impressed with the bedroom’s long corner window seats than the oversized television, and on Friday we used them to admire the heavy but beautiful morning sky over the park.
The sky forebode rain, but we ventured out to the park to the Bromide Springs area to hike up the massive conglomerate rock pile of Bromide Hill in our rain gear. From the hillside we could see the hotel poking out above the trees. We gazed from the overlook and then made our way back down amidst a heavier rain shower, which brought our short hike to an end.
I drove us over to the Little Niagara swimming hole only to find it empty. We posed in our respective umbrellas atop the dry dam; as usual, Wendy looked much more stylish than yours truly. Displays at the nearby nature center explained that starting in 2009 the springs went dry after over 25 years of continuous flow, but periods of no flow have occurred repeatedly over the past century.
Hillside Spring
We admired the animals on display, including a small frog and some snakes. I bought a book about the golden age of the Park Service’s rustic architecture, and then we made our last stop at the park at Hillside Spring. Wendy posed for me beside the spring, and then took a great shot of its flow with her iPhone.
Clearing skies as we drove out of town led me to stop at the Chickasaw Cultural Center. The tribe spent six years and $40 million on the 109 acre facility, which opened in 2010. We liked the statues of a Chickasaw Warrior by Enoch Kelly Haney and Arrival by Mike Larsen, which had several nice features, including contrasting figures looking forward to the new lands in Oklahoma and back at the former ones in Mississippi and Alabama.
We enjoyed walking around the Honor Garden and the Chikasha Inchokka’, a recreation of a Mississippi homelands settlement. The Chikasha Poya (“We are Chickasaw”) Exhibit Center had a large Spirit Forest exhibit and beautiful mosaic with tiles imported from the Scoula Mosaicisti Del Friuli in Spilimbergo, Italy.
The day closed with a delicious dinner at Cafe Alley in downtown Ardmore along our journey southeast to Tyler, Texas for their annual Rose Festival. I’ll document that event in the next post.
Click here for a slideshow from this part of Fall Break 2013
This Sunday, per usual, I had plenty of laundry and grading to do. But I needed a break, so I dashed away to spend an afternoon hour at Philbrook Museum in Tulsa, strolling through the gardens with my camera.
Philbrook Gardens (click image for slideshow)
Greenleaf Lake (click image for slideshow)
A Sunday with a high around 70 lured Wendy and me 111 miles southeast to Greenleaf State Park to hike the first portion of the hiking trail there. On our way south we stopped in Tulsa for lunch at the Texas Roadhouse and to buy books at Gardner’s.
Instead of parking along the abandoned road east of the Highway 10 bridge, as I’d done previously, we started out from the official trailhead in the state park, making our way south and west through the woods to the old dam and spillway, where we enjoyed a snack and posed for a pic.
Then we crossed the Highway 10 bridge, disgusted by the armadillo road kill strewn about. The trail blazes are fading out, so we had to scrounge a bit along the abandoned roads east of the bridge to find the trail leading along the lake shore over to the swinging bridge, where the side fence was covered with spider strands, flung out in the breeze.
Swinging Bridge
Wendy is still getting used to longer hikes, so we turned around at that point, making our way back across the bridge. I couldn’t resist giving the old bridge a good shake while she was mid-span…what a stinker! We found some variety by diverging onto an old road for part of the return journey and ended up hiking 5.25 miles, the longest day hike for Wendy thus far and closing in on my typical day hike of 6 to 7 miles.
Back at the park, we admired deer and turkeys snacking and strutting their way across the grass near the marina. It was great to be hiking in autumn weather, even if the colors have yet to turn.
Weary but happy, we made our way back home, stopping along the way for a delicious and well-earned dinner at El Chico.
Cleveland Trail Daytrip (click map for slideshow)
A week after the autumnal equinox, Wendy and I decided to take advantage of seasonal weather for our first out-of-town hike since we hiked in Colorado in mid-July. It rained three inches the day before, so I quested for a unfamiliar paved trail in the region and decided that a stretch of the old Katy Railroad south of Cleveland, Oklahoma would be suitable. We could drive west and south through the Osage Hills to visit Hominy and Cleveland and then loop by downtown Tulsa for dinner, completing a 135 mile loop.
We drove 50 miles to Hominy, best known to me for its old empty buildings adorned with aging murals by Cha’ Tullis, along with metal silhouettes up on the hillside. We stopped at the historic Drummond home for a guided tour with manager Beverly Whitcomb. She was charming and showed off the 1905 abode, which has many of the original furnishings.
We then drove another 11 miles south through Cleveland to park near the Cedar Creek Apartments along the abandoned Katy railroad right-of-way to hike the asphalt trail eastward toward the Arkansas River and the northwest end of Lake Keystone. It was odd to see power line towers atop concrete pillars in the pool near Cedar Creek. Birds were lined up on a concrete ridge jutting out of the water.
Railroad Bridge
Up ahead we spied the white stone marking the official end of the trail, with a couple wandering about down there. They crossed the Arkansas on the old railroad bridge ahead of us, fishing poles in hand. Wendy did not want to traipse across the softening ties with their treacherous gaps, so I proceeded alone about 1000 feet across the long aging bridge to the far side.
I passed high above a couple of fishermen, laughing by the shore of the Arkansas. The crossing was made more interesting by a missing tie with spiderwebs spanning the gap. There was some fire damage along the bridge, and the eastern end lacked ties, so I had to finish atop a metal side beam.
Walking the Ties
I gazed back across the long bridge, Wendy lost to sight at the far end. I spied the couple who had crossed ahead of me down by the riverside, preparing to fish. I then recrossed the long bridge, glad to reach the western end where Wendy awaited me, proferring a water bottle. We returned to the car, sweaty but glad of our exercise.
We drove 33 miles southeast for a tasty dinner at the Spaghetti Warehouse in downtown Tulsa’s Brady District, afterward enjoying a free concert of Jamaican ska by The Skatalites at the adjacent Guthrie Green, a welcome conclusion to our day trip.
