More OKC Surprises

We certainly didn't expect a canal and river walk in Oklahoma City, but that is what we found. After we visited the Botanical Gardens we took a walk and discovered this peaceful scene.

There also were boats to take people on tours of the canal and downtown area.

Walking along the path we found a magnolia tree beginning to bloom. We had only seen this once before, when we volunteered at Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas.

We passed water falls.

This is the Chickisaw monument.  Oklahoma was once called Indian Territory because that is where the US government sent a number of tribes of Native Americans when white settlers wanted to move onto reservation land.

Perhaps the biggest surprise was the largest bronze monument we have ever seen--the Oklahoma Land Run monument.  This team or horses doesn't seem to want to cross the water.

Obviously many other horses and wagons have already crossed.

We learned some details about the 1889 Oklahoma Land Run while viewing the monument.  That year the congress and president opened up the unassigned lands within Indian Territory to white settlement.  On April 22 a cannon was fired and would-be settlers who had been stopped at the border of those lands rushed in to choose their own 160 acre plot.  It was bedlam.  To learn more about this piece of history, click here.

OKC Surprises

We had spent time in Oklahoma City before and visited the Oklahoma City National Memorial which marks the site of the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building.  It was very moving.  This time we found several surprises that are not nearly as heavy but very interesting.  There was so much to see it will take at least two blog posts to cover it all.

We visited the Myriad Botanical Gardens in the downtown area.  The Crystal Bridge is an indoor tropical garden with many really beautiful plants.

Outside the building we saw a pond with attractive landscaping, including beautiful ornamental grasses.

You can see the Cristal Bridge in the background here.

Inside we saw amazing flowers and plants.  This is a clam claw flower.

I didn't get the names for all the attractive plants we saw.

The variety of orchids was really amazing.

This is some sort of cactus. I had never seen a white one before.  We also saw plants we think are typical in southern Arizona, including a golden barrel cactus.  I guess they are technically tropical too.

As we walked outside again, we saw a lot of amazing fish in the ponds around the Crystal Bridge.

We really enjoyed the gardens, but there was a lot more to see in the area.