OKC to Tulsa to Claremore

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Clay was up first around 7am if you can believe he slept that long. I went to bed about 9:30pm and slept soundly with little pillow wrangling required. We went to breakfast around 8:30am. It was fine. I had yogurt and a toasted bagel with cream cheese and 2 cups of mocha coffee. Clay had a sausage biscuit and orange juice followed by a cinnamon roll. They had fried eggs and a waffle making set up as well. The Sleep Inn was certainly a good value. They also had an indoor pool, whirlpool and fitness center, none of which we used. Just saying.

We checked out around 9:45am and headed to the National Cowboy Museum. It was AH-mazing! If you ever find yourself in OKC, I can recommend a few hours there. We spent less than 2 hours and didn't see everything. But, if you have any interest in native artifacts, westerns, western art or western US history there is something here for you. Very well done. It opened at 10am and we were there shortly after that. We headed out about 11:45am. Oh, the gift shop was exceptional and had a penny press machine for Clay.

We drove towards Tulsa. We stopped about half way for lunch in Cushing, OK at Naifeh's Deli. It was convenient for us and was a popular stop for lunch for the locals. We thought our sandwiches were alright. They made their own potato chips. We shared a chocolate malt that was great! We stopped at Walmart on our way out of Cushing and bought a small collapsible cooler. I am not sure why we didn't think to pack one from home for this road trip. We both had space in our suitcases. We'll fill a spare ziplock with ice from motel ice machines each morning and keep a few of Clay's sodas in the trunk cold each day from here on.

We got to Tulsa around 2pm. About 16 miles out, we had a breakdown in Clay's phone's routing as we had thought we routed with no toll roads. Fortunately, I had 2 dollars in quarters in my wallet. Exact change in coins was required. It cost us a dollar to get green lighted. I'm not sure what went wrong or how to avoid it again. We went to Decopolis in Tulsa. It is a free art deco museum in the Philcade Building with a gift shop across the street. Did you know that Tulsa enjoyed an early 20th century oil boom and with that wealth a downtown business district building boom that coincided with the popularity of Art Deco? We didn't know. But it was amazing for what's been lost as well as what's been preserved. We used a self-guided walking tour. We had to compete for paid parking on a Monday afternoon. We paid $2 for 2 hours of on street parking. The walking tour map had 50 buildings. We saw about 20 of those and went inside about half of those. All were free except we made a donation to enter the Trinity Episcopal Church (to see the stained glass of Adolf Hitler) where we were treated to an organist playing. I sprang a blister in a new place on my left foot about the time we got back to the car and our 2 hours was up. Time to ride! We learned in the gift shop about Tulsa's Golden Driller Statue so that is where we headed next. Clay's next plans were vague as to dinner or another roadside attraction stop. Clay decided he wanted to eat later vs. earlier in any case and we drove all the way out to our motel (which we'd selected due to its proximity to tomorrow morning's attraction, The Will Rogers Museum) in Claremore. We should have eaten at Oklahoma Joe's BBQ in Catoosa and then on to the Blue Whale and to the Microtel in Claremore. Instead we added a 30-mile roundtrip to backtrack for dinner.

So, we spent the late afternoon driving Historic Route 66. Since we backtracked for dinner we saw a lot of a short stretch of it. The Blue Whale is silly but the highlight. There is a busy freight rail line next to it. We can hear the trains from our motel room which is right on Rte. 66. I have historically been a fan of Microtels but this one is under renovation or still being constructed. It is hard to tell which says a lot! We booked it in June with a pay now rate of $55 a night that we actually paid on arrival. So I guess it is still a good value. The room is smaller and dingier than last night's Sleep Inn. The pool and whirlpool are outside and I can't recall seeing a fitness center. As it is a Wyndham chain and not Choice, I guess, there are only 3 small square pillow instead of 5. Useless! The other real detractor is no sheer curtains for daylight. There are only blackout drapes and our ground floor room looks directly at the parking lot 3 feet away, so the drapes have to be closed for privacy. No lamps in the room so the lighting is poor. The wifi is fast and a strong signal and free! There is a hot Continental breakfast included, we'll see what that means exactly. It is adequate, if not as nice as we'd expected. I think this is our only night of this trip outside of the Choice chain. Live and learn. Dinner was fine. Clay said it best. This is probably the cheapest OK-style BBQ we could find. It was oversold by the advertising and under-delivered. The planet's best BBQ beans were served room temperature and were baked bean sweet. 'Nuf said.

So, we spent a good portion of the day driving east across central Oklahoma and we were a little surprised by the landscape. Somehow it was not what we expected. First it was greener and more densely forested than we'd envisioned. Second was the big rolling hills. The roads were very straight, but the ride was mostly either up or down. I think we both envisioned this part of the country being flatter. You'd get to the top of a hill and it would look like a roller coaster in front and behind. Lastly, something is wrong with the car's engine. On cruise control, when the engine should disengage to just coast down hills, it roars into overdrive! Hopefully, we'll make it to Avis in Omaha without any real incident. Another OK surprise for us, shattering our preconceptions yet again, was repeatedly crossing Marine Highway M40 late yesterday on Route 66. I am sure if asked prior to yesterday, we'd have responded that Oklahoma was landlocked.

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