Back from vacation

We have been on a short vacation. We left on Thursday for Guthrie. It takes only about and hour and forty-five minutes to get over there going at a relaxed driving speed. We drove over to Stillwater, and then went by way of Perkins over to Guthrie. We checked in to the Redstone Country Inn where we had made reservations for two nights. That evening we attend the play “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” Steven Sondheim wrote the music and lyrics for this play. It is a mapcap comedy set in Rome two thousand years ago, or so. We had front row seats. They even had a small orchestra for the musical.

The play did not start until 8 pm, so we ate dinner before curtain time at the Hunan Palace one block to the north.

Since the play did not start until 8 pm, it was getting late by time it had finished. We walked back to the Redstone, which was just one block away.

In our suite of rooms (living room, dining room, kitchen, bedroom, bath), we soon hit the sack. Next morning, the first of our two wonderful breakfasts was brought up to our room. We had a leisurely breakfast and then around 10 am we walked to the trolley stop to board the trolley (actually just a bus made to resemble a trolley). The trolley takes you around the various tourist attractions in the town. Most of the attractions are homes that were built a hundred or so years ago. Our driver was the garrulous sort who loved talking about his interest, which includes the local high school football team and the value of property when it was built, (his wife works for the country government real estate office). He drove us by what was easily the largest structure in Guthrie – the Masonic temple.

The tour lasted about an hour with the driver pointing out about twenty points of interest. When we got back, we went geocaching. I had printed four cache sheets before departing on our trip. We found the first three win little difficulty. When we saw the location of the fourth (in weeds with poison ivy), we decided to skip it. The three caches we found were located (1) near a restaurant attached to the bottom of a fence, (2) in a cemetery (this was a virtual cache), and (3) in a notch in a wooden fence in a park.

Later that afternoon, we visited the train station. It was formerly used by the ATSF Railway, and was a busy place in its heyday. Now there is a restaurant and a model train museum located there. We ordered a pizza, and afterwards walked through the model train display. The operator turned on the trains in each of the six layouts in the large room. Various scales were used, going from the largest O gauge, down through HO, N, and finally Z. The man who operated the museum was very friendly. I told him I had recently retired from BNSF, and we swapped stories about railroading and being in the hospital – he for a heart operation and myself for a brain tumor.

This looks like a good stopping place for tonight. Tomorrow I will tell about buying a birthday present for my mother, visiting the banjo museum, Granny Had One, watching Now and Bill Moyers Journal, and touring the Oklahoma City Art Museum.