A Short Trip Down South

Shoal Creek Living History Park: A nice place to walk near Kansas City. It's an interesting conglomeration of buildings dating from 1820 to 1900. We stopped here to stretch our legs during the drive down.

So this past week I took a very short trip with some church friends down to Oklahoma. The long title of this post could be "Three fairly quiet people drive fourteen hours in a tiny rattletrap car and stuff several thousand mailings all in four days."

Becky in the warehouse where we worked. No, she's not smoking; I think that's a pen.

We were volunteering for this organization; our church has supported them for years, and they make use of volunteers year-round. Volunteer work, especially when you're only doing it for such a short time, is usually monotonous. And it was monotonous: we wrote several hundred postcards(my hand, ouch), stuffed several thousand letters, and packaged hundreds of newsletters. The facility was great, though, and the housing was amazing.

After work hours, however, there is almost absolutely nothing to do in Bartlesville. We ate Chinese, walked around downtown(such as it was) visited Braum's(which was a disgustingly dirty place), and stopped by the old train depot.

The depot was neat: the building wasn't open, but the old steam engine was just so huge it had to be interesting, even though none of us understood how it would have worked. Mrs. S rang the bell.

The weather was perfect. One evening we walked around the outside of the Frank Phillips mansion. Frank Phillips was the founder of Phillips 66. He built this enormous house during the depression, had one kid, and adopted two more.

Bartlesville has garishly decorated Bison all over the town. I fail to see how this improves the community. The trip back went fine, I'm glad to be back, and now it's back to work.