We’ve talked about taking a trip to Oklahoma for YEARS! It’s always been a conversation and a trip that we’ve wanted to take. Our only regret is not doing it sooner and not being able to go with Jeff’s parents. Anytime we’ve told anyone where we were going on vacation we always got the question WHY?? Well our why is that it is where Jeff was born when his Dad was stationed there in the Air Force.
We started our trip off with a scheduled EARLY morning flight from Birmingham to Dallas-Fort Worth to Oklahoma City. By doing this early flight we were due into OKC before 11:00 am so we’d have half the day to start exploring. Our flight was scheduled to leave Birmingham at 5:00 am. We did manage to get a few hours sleep and we head towards the airport about 3:00 am. We had to stop for gas on the way. We get about 10 minutes away and get a notification that our second flight has been cancelled and we have been rescheduled to fly through Chicago at a later time and not get to OKC until after 6:00 pm. We start looking and our original flight from BHM to DFW was still scheduled. We found that it was less than 3 hours to drive from DFW to OKC. So we call the airline and was on hold forever. Finally get an agent on the phone after we have parked and walked to the airport. We get him to move us back to our original flight and then we go to our car reservation and change it to pick the car up at DFW. So we are ready. We get checked in and through security with no issues and off we go.
We knew that there were storms around Dallas, but our flight left on-time. Jeff checked the app a couple of times and the arrival time wasn’t really changing. Well the pilot finally comes on and says we are diverting to OKC due to storms in Dallas and to refuel the plane. Well this was the airport we needed to be at. So we land and they give everyone the option to get off the plane. Jeff goes and talks to them and we can get off but they won’t get our luggage off the plane. She explained that with a connecting flight it would come back to OKC on that flight. Well thing was we didn’t have a connecting flight because it got cancelled. So the only other option we had was to stay with our luggage and go on to DFW as planned. If there had been 3 people getting off they would have tried to retrieve our luggage, but it was just the 2 of us. So we went with our new plan which was to pick our car up at DFW and to drive.
We land at DFW in the rain. We claim our luggage, there were less than 10 of us that claimed luggage. It was so odd to see a full plane and no one at baggage claim, everyone was just making a connecting flight. We then follow the signs to the rental car area. We had to wait on a shuttle for them to take us several miles to the rental car pick up area. We get there and pick up our car. We ended up with a black 2026 Chevrolet Equinox. Jeff didn’t eat breakfast because the plan was to eat at the airport in Dallas during our layover. So he was starving. We found a restaurant about 10 minutes from the airport called Old West Cafe and had breakfast before we hit the road north towards Oklahoma City.
Along the way we started seeing Braum’s signs at several exits. There sign has an ice cream cone. I looked and they make their own ice cream. So for me that’s like a beacon. LOL! We found that they are a chain. Their website says over 300 in several states. It was a good time to take a break from driving so we stop at one somewhere on I-35 between Texas and Oklahoma City. I got butter brickle ice cream in a waffle cone. It was really good. We ventured on towards Oklahoma City.
Our first stop in OKC was the National Memorial & Museum. It is a heavy place to visit. Glad we had the opportunity to visit.
Our next stop was to our hotel, The Fordson Hotel. It is an old Ford Motor Company plant that has been converted into a boutique hotel with 135 rooms. There is not a sign out front. We ended up circling the block and double checking the address to be sure we were at the correct place. Our room was real roomy, it had some of the widest hallways we have ever seen in a hotel. We got settled in and took time to rest before dinner.
We had planned to go to dinner at Bricktown. We get in the car and head that way. As we get to the area we start seeing signs for parking at $40-$50. We were like there must be something going on and there was no way we were paying that for parking. Found out that it was Cosmic Baseball. So we ended up going to a restaurant on the next block over from our hotel. It was called The Jones Assembly, I mean how could we not?? We didn’t have reservations and they sat us at a table in the covered patio area. It was cooler.
After dinner we went to find a grocery store to pick up snacks and drinks and we stopped and got gas on the way back to the hotel.
Sunday morning I slept until after 9:00. Guess the early morning and long day of travel caught up with me. We ate breakfast and then headed to Bricktown. Parking was normal prices and there wasn’t really anyone out yet. We went on the first Water Taxi ride of the day. It is really more of just a 40 minute historical ride on a pontoon boat they don’t stop and let people get off and on, so not really a “taxi”. The boat captain gave us the history of this man-made canal that runs through the downtown area of Oklahoma City. He pointed out restaurants along the way. After we finished we decided to grab lunch at Bricktown BBQ. We walk over there and they don’t look open. We didn’t see any customers or workers. Everything we found online said they should be open so we tried the door and it was open. We ended up being the first customers of the day. All the workers were sitting at the back side of the restaurant just waiting on customers.
After lunch we walked down to Myriad Botanical Gardens,. When we got there we found that they were having a Tulip Festival. But they only had a few tulips. They had signs around saying that tulips grow based on the weather and since it has been so warm they had bloomed early. They still went on with the festival. They had vendors outside, food and merchandise. We paid to go in the greenhouse. Boy was it hot in there. We ended up having to take off our jackets and we didn’t stay long. They have a small pond in the front and the greenhouse spans over it. So we walked under the greenhouse walking around the pond.
We walked past the Paycom center and saw where they are building the new one.
When it was time to head back to the car we weren’t real sure where we had parked. We ended up a block over from the street where we came into the Bricktown area. Doing this we found a couple of art installations that we wouldn’t have seen. We did eventually end up back at the car.
We then headed across town to the Cowboy and Western Museum. We looked around the museum and watched the immersive movie experience. All 4 walls of the room showed the movie and there were different things that also showed on the floor. Sometimes it would feel like the floor was moving. The seats in the room were like hay bales which means there is not back to your seat. We ended up sitting back to back so that we could lean on each other.
When we finished and got headed back to downtown we stopped by the Skydance Bridge and Scissortail Park. We ended up finding free parking on the other side of the bridge from downtown. We knew that there was another Cosmic Baseball game and parking costs were going to be more expensive. So we thought about not going and waiting to see if we could fit it in before we left the area, but then we found how to get to the other side of the bridge and found the free parking.
After walking across the bridge and into the park we headed back to the room. We made a reservation for later that night and went back to The Jones Assembly. We just walked over. We sat in the dining room on this visit. Our waitress offered a couple of suggestions and with that we ordered a pizza that she suggested. It was a butter chicken pizza. It sounds strange but ended up being really good. We were just missing the rice. I had a ceasar salad. It was big enough for two, but Jeff doesn’t eat salad. We also had the scratch biscuits with honey butter and we took back with us what they call the Midnight Snack, it was 4 cookies, chocolate chip, molasses marshmallow, peanut butter crunch and raspberry & corn. We tried them all, but unfortunately they were cooked a little darker than we prefer. But we did taste all of them.
What we did on Monday was the entire reason we planned the trip. I’ll let Jeff share about our Monday shenanigans in another post!
We ate lunch Monday at Route 66 Cafe in Clinton, OK. I had an onion burger and tater tots. Jeff had meatloaf, macaroni and cheese and mashed potatoes with gravy.
After lunch we went to the Route 66 museum in Clinton.
Before heading back towards OKC we stopped in Braum’s for ice cream. Jeff got Cookie Monster and I got chocolate turtle. We saw signs for live Bison on the way. The signs pointed to a store at an upcoming exit. We found a Bison statue, but not any live. We think that maybe we should have went to the building behind it, but we didn’t see it until we were getting back on the interstate. Oh well! We also stopped in at the Indian Trading Post that we kept seeing signs for. We looked around but did not find anything we needed. We drove through Mustang, OK. We got there right as school was getting out and traffic was really heavy. We didn’t end up finding anywhere we wanted to stop. We only saw the same things we have at home. We did see a few things that brought back memories from our childhood.
We then headed back to downtown OKC and went looking for the Stockyards. We realized as we were crossing a bridge into downtown that the GPS didn’t take us to the correct place and we ended up a couple blocks off. But at that point we were just ready to go back to the room and rest before dinner.
We walked a couple blocks to Sun Cattle Co for dinner. Jeff had a corndog and I had a fried bologna sandwich and we had chili cheese fries.
More to come.