Fall Break State Park Adventures

The kids were out of school for three days for Fall Break and since Enid is still a new place for us, we found lots of new adventures to take.  Josh picked up a State Park Passport at one of his newcomer’s briefings.  It has listed all the State parks in OK by region. We live in the Red Carpet region so we focused on our area first.  Each state park has a list of activities to complete while there and a sticker to collect for the passport.  As we accumulate visits to the parks, we can redeem up to nine tokens representing our adventures.  In three days, we traveled to four state parks.  Josh was even able to take two days of work off to join us.

            

We traveled to Roman Nose, named for a Cherokee Chief, and one of the seven original state parks.  We did a little hike to the dam of the lake.  Unfortunately, we did not time this visit well as the paddle boats and miniature golf were only open on weekends.  

The weather is beautiful now.  The humidity has decreased the days have been mild and sunny 

We went to Boiling Springs, took two lovely hikes, and enjoyed the gift shop.  We also saw the bubbling spring in the well which used to be a larger geyser at one time. 

We have not seen a lot of fall colors yet so this tree was a lovely sight

We went to Gloss Mountain and walked up the steep stairs to the top of the plateau for the view.  It was lovely, and vast, and flat.  The kids enjoyed looking for the scattered selenite that sparkles in the sun.  Sometimes when we would step onto the rock, it would sound hollow. 

Lastly, we traveled to Alabaster Caverns where we took a tour into the cave made of gypsum.  Gypsum caves do not have growing structures so we could run our hands over every surface.  We enjoyed seeing the domes in the ceiling of the cave made by the whirlpooling water.  The kids enjoyed seeing the bats in the cave starting their hibernation. 

No cameras allowed in the cave so you will just have to travel here to see for yourself!

Driving through OK sometimes feels like driving in rural Japan in that the two-lane roads meander through fields and farms and don’t feel like they are getting anywhere.  There are small towns along the way and scattered houses in the middle of what feels like nowhere.  We also noted the road signs pointing to CEMETERY.  We probably passed at least 10 of these signs.  We could never see the cemeteries from the highway, and we wondered how big they were, why there were so many in such remote areas, and what was of note about the cemeteries.  One day we will need to follow the signs to find out for ourselves. Another adventure to take!