September 12th

We had a dry, restful night at a campground on the edge of Oklahoma. They didn't have any fire rings. We asked a ranger about it and we were told that they were stolen...ok, so no fire tonight. I was pretty bummed because I was really looking forward to using our new pudgy pie irons. Oh well. We packed up in the morning and were on our way again.

We found this dinosaur of a sign for Rest Haven Motel. The motel itself appears to have been converted into rental apartments which didn't seem to be in much better shape than the sign.

Further down the road, we found this old auto court motel. I believe the spaces between the buildings used to be covered, and were a place to park your car

This is one of my favorite pictures.

A few miles off of rt. 66 is Totem Pole park, built by Ed Galloway. This is where you will find the tallest totem pole in the world!

There were a lot of owls on the totem poles and other sculptures. This guy was my favorite.

At first glance, the place just seems so kitschy and silly, just some fun yard art of enormous proportions. But upon further inspection, you find this guy really was an artist. There were 300 handmade fiddles on display. Ed Galloway made each one with a different type of wood.

Sign number 24 of 879,33

Further down the road we spotted the infamous Blue Whale of Catoosa! This guy serves as a dock(in his mouth and down the tail), water slides (flippers on either side), diving platform (from the tip of his tail) and loft (second floor at the top of his head). A man built him as an anniversary present for his wife, how romantic!

Earlier I mentioned our list of "must sees" from Aunt Nancy, our Rt. 66 expert. Well we couldn't miss this "roadside attraction" in Tulsa Oklahoma! We dropped in for a visit with Aunt Mary, Barb and Bob. And by "drop in" I mean we called them and said "What are you doing? We're in Tulsa, how do we get to your house?" I'm so glad we were lucky enough to catch them when they weren't busy. We had a great time looking at old pictures and catching up. They treated us to meal at Freddy's, and helped us find our next destination, Red Rock Canyon state park.

The campsites were all down in the canyon. So maybe it doesn't look that steep in the picture, but I was driving and had to sit up to see the road over the hood. Kind of scary! We don't get much of that in Indiana.

So it was late in the day when we arrived, but at the bottom of the canyon the sun had set and it was getting dark. We tried to start a fire but it had apparently rained the day before. Everything including our firewood was damp. No pudgy pies. But we did make a friend, there was this cute cat who kept us company all night. He followed us everywhere, and would have slept with us in the teardrop if we let him. He tried to jump in many times! The park was gorgeous and true to it's name. It's also a popular place for rock climbing. In the morning we took our quarter showers. My new pet peeve. We're paying for camping, now you're charging us for 5 minutes of warm water? Ugh. All we had was a 10 dollar bill for the change machine so we got like 12 pounds of quarters back.