Woke to a crisp 46°….hard to get out from under the covers even with the heater running. But it didn’t take long for the sun to start warming things up. I woke up the morning of the rain/hail storm and looked at the trailer ceiling to assess the hail damage. Couldn’t see any indents….however, yesterday sitting on the end of the mattress, I looked up and yes, indeed, there are indents from the hail. We’ve been buying stickers from the various places we’ve visited and putting them on the ceiling…didn’t buy any stickers in Uvalde, TX, but we’ve got hail dents to remember our time spent there.😏
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Moving day again….we’re heading to the Oklahoma City KOA. This will be our third separate time staying there…getting a cabin tonight. A bit more expensive than a tent site, but we won’t have the work of converting the bike trailer into a living space and it’s cheaper than a hotel…and we plan on hitting the road again tomorrow morning.
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I was in the bathroom drying my hair when Roseanne came in. Yesterday when I greeted her, she just looked my way and didn’t say anything. Today, she responded to my greeting and we had a brief chat about what it takes to get going in the morning. I was surprised to find that in a normal conversation, she didn’t sound shrill at all. But she did say that her dad used to wake them by barking orders in a military fashion. Maybe that’s a little insight into why she sounded like a general, ordering the man and the dogs around…maybe it was a learned behavior and her voice got shrill in the process.
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Texas is known for its cattle but there have also been a fair amount of goat farms on the route we’ve been traveling. And most of the goats have white bodies with a brown neck and head. So this is the story I came up with: these are milking goats and this breed is known for the quality of its milk and cheese. But I also found out that there is a specialized market for goat meat. Hmmmm……
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| Left our signature at 'Bedlam' in Stamford, Texas |
When we get on the road going from Point A to Point B, I turn to my favorite travel companion…Roadside America. Well, favorite travel companion of the non-person type. About 40 miles north of Abilene is Stamford, home of Johnny Anders, the town’s artistic and ingenious mayor. He created a 22 foot T-rex sculpture out of junk car parts….it’s right there next to his auto body repair shop. And according to Roadside America he was inspired by the Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo to create ‘Bedlam: Pickup Truckbed Henge’ (took me longer than it should have to realize that the name was a take-off on Stonehenge)…it’s a ring of pickup truck beds sunk in the ground ready for people to stop by and do some spray painting. Because these quirky things are out there for people like me, we bought some spray paint, hunted down this opportunity to legally spray graffiti on something, and left our mark. Oh, and Johnny Anders also made a cross of chrome wheels and put it in the center of the truck beds. Personally, I thought the cross could have benefited from a different location. Seemed out of place among the Bedlam graffiti. We got a bit creative and left our mark in two places…KB2 with a smiley face in one spot and Kim n Karen, Charlevoix, MI in another. And across the road from the Bedlam site is a spider sculpture made with a small car as the spider body. Never would have known about this opportunity if it weren’t for a smart phone and the Roadside America app…just part of the fun of travel! And just in case we come across another opportunity for legal graffiti, we have paint. 😊
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Next up on the Roadside America tour was Wichita Falls, home of the World’s Smallest Skyscraper. It’s hard to pinpoint the real story behind the building because every site I found had most of the same information but a detail or two was different. And most of the articles use the ‘legend’ in the recounting of the history of the building. The back story is that there was oil boom in 1912 and settlers flocked to the area. Office space was badly needed and this is where J.D. McMahon, owner of an oil rig construction firm, stepped in. These are excerpted paragraphs from Wikipedia:
According to local legend, when McMahon announced in 1919 that he would build a high-rise annex to the Newby Building as a solution to the newly wealthy city’s urgent need for office space, investors were eager to invest in the project. McMahon collected $200,000 in investment capital from this group of naïve investors, promising to construct a high-rise office building across the street from the St. James Hotel.
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| World's smallest skyscraper |
The key to McMahon’s swindle, and his successful defense in the ensuing lawsuit, was the he never verbally stated that the actual height of the building would be 480 feet. The proposed skyscraper depicted in the blueprints that he distributed (and which were approved by the investors) was clearly labeled as consisting of four floors and 480 inches.
McMahon used his own construction crews to build the McMahon Building on the small, unused piece of property next to the Newby Building, without obtaining prior consent from the owner of the property, who lived in Oklahoma. As the building began to take shape, the investors realized they had been swindled into purchasing a four-story edifice that was only 40 ft. tall, rather than the 480 ft. structure they were expecting.
They brought a lawsuit against McMahon but, to their dismay, the real estate and construction deal was declared legally binding by a local judge—as McMahon had built exactly according to the blueprints they had approved, there was to be no legal remedy for the deceived investors. There was no stairway installed in the building upon its initial completion, as none was included in the original blueprints. Rather, a ladder was employed to gain access to the upper three floors. By the time construction was complete, McMahon had left Wichita Falls and perhaps even Texas, taking with him the balance of the investors’ money. The building was abandoned, fell into disrepair and in 1986 the city gave the building to the Wichita County Heritage Society (WCHS) with the hope that it would eventually be restored, making it a viable part of the Depot Square Historic District. By 1999, it had proved to be an excessive financial burden on the WCHS. The architectural firm of Bundy, Young, Sims and Potter was hired to stabilize the structure. Dick Bundy and his partners became fascinated with the history and legacy of the building; they arranged a partnership with Marvin Groves Electric, another local business , to purchase the building. In December 2000, the city council voted to allow the WCHS to sell the building to Marvin Groves for $3,748.
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Took us way too long to find the Artificial Falls and truth be told, we never did find exactly how to get next to it. But we did see it from the highway as noted, and it wasn’t running…as in there was no water falling down the man-made waterfall!! This is what the website wichitafallstx.gov has to say: The city’s original falls (the namesake of the city) washed away in a flood in the 1800s. In 1987, a new falls was constructed upstream. The present 54-foot man-made waterfall is a multi-level cascade on the south bank of the Wichita River. The Falls can be seen by southbound motorists on I-44 as they cross the bridge over the river. The Falls provides many wonderful photographic opportunities, and blah,blah, blah. (My way of saying there’s too much to type and it provides no information of substance.)
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These are a couple of paragraphs from a very long article written by William Hauptman, published in The New York Times on Aug.7, 1988. He is from Wichita Falls and in this article about going home, he included a snippet about the falls. I found it on the nytimes.com site:
So Wichita Falls built an artificial waterfall to ''put the falls back in Wichita Falls'' and give the city what then-Mayor Charles Harper called ''a symbol of hope.'' The new falls were inaugurated on June 5, 1987, during a three-day ''FallsFest,'' which organizers called ''the biggest turn-on in North Texas.'' The entertainment included the country-rock singer Joe Ely and the United States Army's Golden Knights parachute team. Willard Scott of NBC's ''Today'' show even broadcast the weather from there.
The notion of rebuilding the falls had been around for a long time. In 1985, a local group called Streams and Valleys decided the time had come to do something, and offered to raise $250,000 by public subscription. Not everyone was for it. Many people, especially older residents, were stubbornly opposed, for various reasons - it was a waste of money, it was in the wrong place. I spoke to one of these older residents, whom I'll call Mr. Bud Stone, to protect the anonymity he requested.
The last thing he told me was, ''You see, the real falls was in colored town, and that's why people pretend they don't know where it was.''
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The statement that the ‘original falls washed away in a flood’ certainly caught my attention. Didn’t know such a thing could happen. I’m sure it’s a wonderful site as an entry point into the city…when the water is running, that is. The way it is now it’s just a bunch of rust colored rocks…nothing special there. Interesting to find out what factors into the decision to turn them off on any particular day…because I know that if I had a town with falls in the name and I made a waterfall to play into that, I’d make sure they were running. Do they only run on weekends? Is electricity too costly? Seems like the city could give itself a break on that one. The water of Wichita River is a nasty reddish brown which would account for the rust colored rocks…I’m assuming that they use the water from the river to create the falls. Anyway, we gave it a good try to get to it so I could take a picture of the non-running fake falls, but the way in was too elusive so we drove on our merry way. As we were leaving the area, Kim said he was feeling like we were caught in some freakin’ Chevy Chase vacation movie. 😏
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| The chairs are lit up at night...OKC memorial |
Made it to the KOA about 6:15 p.m. Got settled in the cabin and then headed out to see the Oklahoma City Bombing Memorial at night. I’d read that it had a whole different feel to it at night and since we had the time, we unhooked the trailer and took just the truck this time. Wandered around the whole area, which we didn’t do before in our haste to get the truck and trailer out of a parking lot we shouldn’t have been in. Stood there thinking about innocent people going about their workday, never realizing the evil that was literally outside the building. This is a very well thought out memorial...it's worth a stop if you're going through Oklahoma City.
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