Sunday, October 10, 2010

A Short Trip

I guess I wasn't really in the mood for travelling.  I had a good day Friday, as noted.  I stopped at a garage sale - just before the produce stand - and found this.

 - 

I've been looking for a nice wooden Chinese Checker board for a long time.  The metal ones are too shallow and the board is often bumped, scattering the marbles and ruining plenty of games.  This one is Masonite with a wooden frame.  It's a double layer so the holes are all the way through and should hold the marbles well.  If you can read the text, it says:


I've never heard the game called Chinker Chek before.

It was a tiring day Saturday.  I walked the cemetery and found that I had the wrong one for the Cooley family I was hunting.  They were buried a few miles "down the road".  So I headed to my nephew's church to see his latest project.

My nephew and his wife and daughter spent a year and a half in Bolivia working for Hospitals of Hope, based in Wichita, Kansas.  Now Nephew is working for them again, in Wichita this time.  Here's what he's up to.


Nephew has been hired to convert metal shipping containers into sturdy clinics.  As I understand it, these are going to Haiti.


The container has three rooms: an office and two exam rooms.  To see YouTube videos from Hospitals of Hope, click here

After that I decided to head for home, coming south on Hwy 81 again.  I stopped this time to take photos of this unusual bridge in the southwest part of Wichita.


Looking south:


Looking north  

From 81, I ended up driving east to wander through Ponca City and Blackwell.  I circled the main street in Blackwell and couldn't even make myself stop and go into their wonderful antique shop.  I certainly was tired!  I picked up Interstate 35 and headed south, but decided I needed one more night - of no itinerary. I ended up in Edmond, 30 minutes from home, and rested very well.  I was glad to get home on Sunday.

Sunday evening our family went into downtown Oklahoma City.  Devon Energy is building a tower said to be the tallest west of the Mississippi, when finished.  We thought we ought to check on their progress.  We parked as close as we could then walked a round-about way to the construction site.  My 11-year-old grandson took the photo on the left (in which you can see we wanderers) and my nearly-13-year-old grandson took this photo on the right.




We were able to walk right up to where crews were working that evening.  

Later we climbed 10 floors to the top of a parking garage to watch the work below and to behold the glorious sunset.


My 11- and 12-year-old grandsons took the sunset photos.

One of the workers said that they expected to pour a lot of concrete that evening and we wanted to see it happen.  We waited for the cement trucks to come.  After a very long and tiresome wait, we gave up.  Their trucks were delayed due to thunderstorms in the west.  We went home.

It was an interesting weekend and very little of it was in my original plan - - I never even took the camping gear out of the trunk.