Great News and Oklahoma

I would like to start with non-travel related news — Brian and Julie got engaged on the 24th!!!!!!   We are soooo happy for them!!!!!!!

Now to travel news:  

We visited two state parks in Oklahoma, Osage Hills and Robbers Cave. 

While at Osage Hills we went to Owasso, OK and visited our friends Lynn and Kevin.  We hadn’t seen them in several years, but it was like we saw them yesterday.  It was a fun visit…except for the tornado warning and hail while we were visiting.  Though for Dave and I it was nice to be in a house during the warning and hail, not the camper.  

Thanks, Lynn and Kevin for a great visit.

Piece of hail while in Owasso

We did two hikes while at Osage Hills.  One meandered through the woods and the other went by a portion of the lake from above.  Enjoy the pictures.

There were lots of these flowers on the woodsy walk in Osage Hills.  As seen below, in certain open areas along the hike there were fields of them.

My eyes are always drawn to purple flowers

There are two lizards hanging out together.  Look closely to see the brown head near the back of the green one.

Pretty flowers in several places on our hikes

View of the lake from above

This was just a random building along the trail

We tried to speculate what it was

But really had no idea

We thought this lizard was interesting because of hour round his middle portion was.  They are usually much more streamlined.

There were butterflies fluttering about quite a bit.  I finally caught one

We then moved on to Robbers Cave State Park.  Dave wanted to go here as it is famous for a psychology experiment that occurred there at Group Camp 2.  The name of the study is Robbers Cave study by Sherif if you would like to read about it.  I believe my telling of it from Dave would be like the old game telephone, not quite right.

There was a lot of history to the park.  The name Robbers Cave came from the fact that outlaws like Belle Star, Jesse James, Cole Younger and the Dalton Gang would use this area as a hideout.  There was an area called the Stone Corral where they could leave their horses and then there was the cave where they could hide out.  There wasn’t much law enforcement in the area, so they didn’t know about the cave. 

When the park was established, the Civilian Conservation Corp worked on roads and buildings in the park.  What a wonderful program that was.  It benefited all involved. 

There have been numerous parks that we have been to that the CCC was vital to.

When we first got to our campsite at the park and were all set up we couldn’t figure out what this loud noise was.  So we went to check it out and it was water running super fast due to the bad weather/tornado that they had a few days before we arrived.

Its’s hard to tell in the picture, but this was a side road and the water was going under the bridge, but a portion was coming over the bridge and back down into the river on the other side.  However, both point look like mini waterfalls.

The first night we were in the park we went to the restaurant for dinner, which overlooked the lake.  We walked around after and found this interesting piece of history.

                                            This was on the back side of the restaurant under the building

We did two hikes at this park, the Robbers Cave Hike and a walk through the woods hike.  We did them both the first day, since the rest of the time we were there it was supposed to rain.  

The above 3 pics are walking through the area to get to the cave.  You can see how it is a easy area to hide

This is the coral area where the outlaws left their horses before they moved on to the cave

Someone had built these very large Carins.  They were cool to look at, but they did not direct you to the trail.

Told ya, gotta love the purple flowers

This was just a very interesting rock with various colors that I saw when I looked over one of the cliffs

Robbers Cave

Robbers Cave

There were severe thunderstorms the day after our hike.  I felt really bad for the tenters through that  storm.  The forecast was not going to get better and in fact the day we were supposed to leave was going to be heavy rain all day.  So we packed up a day early and drove on the better weather day. 

This is the horse trail the day after the thunderstorm.  It was dry the day before.

A stream we saw coming down the day after the storm

Today we are in Arkansas, right outside of Little Rock.  We were right to travel here yesterday, as the prediction for about 5 hours today is 98-100% chance of rain.  It has been raining consistently for the last couple hours.  Glad we are here instead of driving in it.  We are here for the rest of the week and look forward to doing some exploring as the weather permits.

Til next time…