Mom and I left town Sunday morning for one of our Cemetery Adventures.
I have been corresponding with a gal in Oregon who was originally from Oklahoma. I asked if Earlene had photos of markers from her family in Vici, Oklahoma. She had a list; Mom and I prepared.
So, on Sunday, June 30th, with the temperature in the high seventies - rather than our usual 100+ - we left Midwest City heading northwest. The first interesting thing we came to was on the Northwest Expressway - a protest.
Apparently this particular church supports Planned Parenthood and this group finds that objectionable. So do I.
From I-44 we picked up Highway 3 and headed for Okarche. Nothing was open on Sunday morning except the churches, so I stopped in the middle of the highway (remember, it's Sunday) to take a photo of this house and yard. What a great way to start off.
At Kingfisher we looked around briefly, then turned west for Watonga. Again, a brief tour - you have to remember that these are all small-ish towns and brief is as good as it gets.
It was Sunday morning and I noticed as we drove that the utility poles looked like a line of crosses along the road. Most of them are T-shape, but these had a length added to the top to carry another set of lines. This photo is washed-out, for some reason, but still conveys what I watched for miles and miles.
From Seiling we kept our northwest direction, along Governor George Nigh's "Northwest Passage", as the signs kept reminding us. Wikipedia has a good article, including this paragraph:
"In the early 1980s, Governor George Nigh was able to obtain $97.1 million to upgrade the highway between Oklahoma City and Colorado, despite opponents labeling the project 'The highway to nowhere'."
It may have been nowhere to those political opponents, but it sure is a blessing for we ordinary people who like to travel.
Another website - Oklahoma Highways.com - has this to say:
"OK 3 is the longest state highway in Oklahoma, by far, and has to be one of the top three longest state highways in the country."
This website is fabulous! Eric Stuve not only gives information about the highways -- there are photographs. Hooray for him!
That's another drive to add to my list of travels for the future - follow Highway 3 from one corner of the state to the other - over 600 miles.
Back to our current trip - we finally arrived in Woodward about 1:30 in the afternoon, having driven 191 miles for a drive that my distance calculator says is less than 150. That's a lot of back-tracking and circling neighborhoods and downtowns.
We looked around for a few minutes, ate lunch at Subway, and checked into the hotel for a nap. After resting, we drove to Elmwood Cemetery where we wanted to find four graves and photograph the markers.
It's a very nice cemetery and I'm sorry that I didn't take photos of anything other than the markers. There is a white stone wall running along the north side of the cemetery that encloses the graves in the way that churchyards in Great Britain do. I don't think I've seen one in Oklahoma or Kansas walled like that. I'll bet I can find some photos online, if I look hard enough. Hmmm. No one else seems to find that wall as nice as I did - no photos turn up.
Elmwood is a nice cemetery. Yes, I know I already said that. It has a digital directory! Just what I needed, as the office was closed. The directory told me exactly where to find the names, but the huge map in a frame outside the gazebo housing the directory had light colored numbers of the blocks and was impossible to read. What a disappointment when they had installed such a good, helpful system. They opened at 7 a.m. Monday morning, so we retired to our room for the rest of the day.
Back at the cemetery in the morning, the office was open but vacant, so I checked the map on the wall and finally located the other markers we were to snap pictures of. On the way back to the hotel we passed this sculpture by Bradford J Williams and stopped to photograph it.
There was no way to get a clear background in this photo. Mom likes the statues very much and wants a copy in her yard. I told her that for probably $5,000 or $10,000 she could have one. Looked it up this morning and found that the $10,000 would get her a table-top version.
We left Woodward headed for Vici and the Sunnyside Cemetery. We wandered.
First stop was to circle through Sharon, Oklahoma. We found a little house we liked, with a Welsh-name family living there. Do we look for Wales everywhere? You bet we do!
At the end of a dirt road we found this pastoral scene. As I came closer to the goats, they began to move away and I ended up with just one sort-of close-up.
But I really wanted the windmill. We saw a lot of modern turbines along the highway, and a surprising number of these old windmills, including one that was actually working. Shattuck, Oklahoma has a windmill museum and one of these days . . .
Next stop: Mutual, Oklahoma. There isn't much there except the school. On the main road someone has parked a collection of old farm implements.
Did someone design this to look like a creature?
Looking at my map book, "The Roads of Oklahoma", by Shearer Publishing in 1997, we turned south on County Road 216 to head for Highway 34 and the cemetery. I see on the Internet that my book is no longer available from the publisher. That's too bad. It's been sold, 'updated', colored, and re-bound. I guess I'll have to keep repairing my copy. It's been invaluable to me; probably the best atlas I've ever owned.
The improved road ran out and we were on gravel, raising a bit of dust.
Clipping down the road, I screeched to a halt. Mom wanted to know what was going on. I had seen a turtle crossing the road and didn't know if I hit him. Walking back, I could see him closing up his shell. I squatted down and waited. He peeked.
We finally made it to the Sunnyside Cemetery. It was nice, with plenty of monuments (easy to walk and look) and we found what we needed. On to Vici and a cool place to sit and have a drink. Here's what we found - - -
Very nice inside, friendly people, good food. It can't get better than that. It's on our Yes! list. This little park is downtown and a nice place to sit for a while:
Heading east along Highway 34, it was time for another screeching whip-off-the-road moment. Cestos is where Earlene lived as a child, the lady for whom we were taking all the photos. This sign, and an abandoned building that probably was once a store, are all that are left.
East again, this is the scenery we delighted in. It was good to see so much hay in the fields. These last few years have been so horribly dry that hay was either imported from other states, or animals sold off, as farmers and ranchers couldn't afford to feed them. A field of hay bales is a glorious sight this year.
If you're feeling claustrophobic and need some wide-open spaces,
Oklahoma is the place to be.
Oklahoma! where the wind comes sweeping down the plain . . .
Back once again at Watonga,
these massive grain elevators are still at work every day.
The End
