Oklahoma City

My next stop was Oklahoma City which was an 8 hour drive. I went through the top of Texas but did not stop off anywhere in the state. I did consider stopping off in Texas to see if I could buy a gun, because I just thought it would be funny to buy a gun in Texas, but I chose not to.

There wasn't much to this drive. This was the first time I saw horses on the side of the road instead of cows. There was this HUGE cross in Texas. Like... humongous! I have video of it, I'll add it to here.

My host in Oklahoma City took me to Sonic for dinner (cause I chose it, never ate it before). I got a hamburger and tater tots with chili-cheese on it. The next day I had Tex-Mex and I got enchilada's filled with cheese and topped with chili-cheese. So, one thing I learned about Oklahoma City is they like cheese. Or maybe... I like cheese since I ordered these items.

Oklahoma was a pretty powerful experience, one of the most powerful of the trip. I hadn't even thought about visiting the Oklahoma City Bombing Memorial, in fact I didn't even know there was such a thing. It was suggested I check it out and so I did. It was incredibly moving. I remember watching this unfold on TV, just like I remember Columbine happening on TV and the 9/11 events unfolding on TV.

The Bombing Memorial is on 5th street in downtown Oklahoma City. The street used to run straight through but now it is blocked off when you arrive at the memorial site by a wall on both ends of the street where the Federal Building was. It looks like this:



To the left was where the Federal Building was, to the right was some other building. Here are some images of the memorial area:





The above two images are of a weeping Jesus. Behind him is a fence with images of some of the dead that people put on it, or children's toys for the children who died in the bombing. An example of the fence is below.



The next image is after you walk through one of the tall black walls. There are two of those walls, one has the time 9:01 on it and the other has 9:03 on it, in-between those walls is the memorial area... the time between 9:01 and 9:03, being 9:02, when the bomb went off.



This next image below is looking out onto the memorial area. You will see all these chairs, they light up at night. There is something like 9 rows of chairs. Each row represents a floor in the federal building. For however many chairs there are in a row, there were that many dead on the floor. So, there's a chair for everyone who died. There is also a section of 5 chairs off to the side. Those chairs represent the 5 people who died outside the Federal Building.




There is also a museum for the memorial area of the events surrounding the bombing. I went in and it was really interesting. You go to the top floor of this three-story building and you sit down in a room and an audio recording starts. The recording is of a convention that began at 9am near the Federal Building. Two minutes into the recording you can hear the bomb explode and then the lights go out in the room you are sitting in and on the wall infront of you all the faces of everyone who died appears. Next, two doors open up and you hear blaring news reports of the on-the-scene coverage of the first news response to the bombing. You walk into the room and it's kind of chaotic with no real sense of where to go, it is set up like that to give you the feeling of confusion as the people who were in the building would have experienced (those not immediately killed). As you walk through and down the building you progress from the moment the bomb went off to the conviction of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols.

It is a very interesting memorial site and it makes me wonder why something like this is not in New York. It is a rather moving experience to be there, and something I had not even planned for my trip at all.

After leaving the Memorial I walked further into Downtown. I went to this area called Bricktown where everything is built out of bricks. This is where I had my Tex-Mex meal. There was this little river walk area that was cute, but kind of small.

My host also told me about this building that has a slide for an emergency exit... it's like 9 stories high or something. She said if you go down it, it spirals down and kicks you out into the lobby of the building where security will escort you out of the building for using it in a non-emergency situation. I was plannign on recording myself going down the slide and then being "escorted" out, but I didn't know what building it was in and by the time my host got back to me I was on to my next destination, Arkansas.

Here are some other pictures I took while in Oklahoma.