Because We Can

More museums today, The Phillips Petroleum Company Museum, Bartlesville Area History Museum and The Frank Phillips Home. We both really enjoyed the Phillips Petroleum museum, and not just because the Company was much of our life for many years. So why a barber chair in a petroleum company museum? Frank Phillips, who started the company, started out in life as a barber, so there was a barber shop inside the main company building. It was gone before I ever started with Phillips, so here was my chance to relive the past that I never got to see in the first place. The other museum we enjoyed was the Frank Phillips Home, which was a time capsule of the 1930's, though unfortunately you couldn't take photos while inside the house. It was interesting that Frank didn't have a home office which the homes of these past titans of industry usually seem to have. On the other hand, there were separate bedrooms for he and his wife. Guess the saying, Business before Pleasure, is tru...

Woolaroc was the country home of Frank Phillips, founder of Phillips Petroleum, and in his later years he turned it into an awesome museum that seeks to show what Oklahoma was like before the modern days of the 1930's. There is so much to see and do that we spent all day there and really need to go back some other time to see all that we missed. Speaking of missing, Linda got to throw the tomahawk three times and she was 100% successful, missing all three throws. When it came to the rope swing she was again 100% successful, this time at acting just like a little girl. But since she really is a little girl at heart, it really wasn't that hard for her. I just couldn't get the hang of this knotted rope swing, and was lucky to swing once and get off without falling on my butt. Besides being a museum Woolaroc is also a game preserve, which means I have had to sort through dozens of animal photos in order to find the perfect picture. I have to believe that as we drov...

Dewey is a small town a few miles north of Bartlesville with nothing particularly outstanding to recommend it as a place to spend the day, so that is what we did. Maybe it was the connection between my beloved "Aunt Fern and Unky" and the cowboy movie star Tom Mix who's museum is in town. Or maybe it was the fact that the people we ran into were downright nice. Then again, maybe it was because we discovered most people our age had at one time or another worked for Phillips, or just maybe it was because being there just felt right. What ever it was, we had a great time, and the photo pretty much sums up the way I saw how the town looks at Life. Look close and you will see there are no hoses on the gas pumps. Back in Bartlesville, I drove Linda around the downtown area, but told her we would come back in the early evening and walk around as there wouldn't be any people there then. I was right, after five o'clock it was practically deserted with just the occa...

Not every RV park is a four star resort, and in fact I don't think we have ever stayed at one of those places. This park in Yoder had been perfect for us. A 50 amp full hookup pull through site, gravel pad, open sky, and not too much noise. Just a nice place to spend a few nights while doing our thing. Nothing to do for kids, absolute minimal bathroom facilities. What can I say, it's our kind of place. Still today it was time to pull up stakes and head to Oklahoma and another page out of our past life. We opted to take the US highways, staying off the Interstate and turnpike. That meant we got to see a number of small towns, each with a main street lined with old buildings. We also left the wheat fields behind and traveled through rolling hills carpeted with green grass and dotted with trees. That also meant the roads were narrower, with hills and curves as opposed to the wide flat straight roads of Kansas. Some four hours after we had left Yoder we topped that la...