Wichita Falls

After spending the morning driving through Oklahoma, we finally get into Texas. You can tell we're in Texas when the rest area looks like an oil derrick. Our tuna sandwich  for lunch suddenly looked much richer.

The Wichita Falls Campground has a long history of accommodating weary travelers. Although the old days were simpler, I still like our basic facilities, like running water and Air Conditioning.

Two great things happened today. Firstly, we arrived in Wichita Falls TX alive and secondly, it's Grammies birthday so we get to go out for supper! When in Rome; so we went to Texas Roadhouse for meat. Those pails are for peanuts, not in case we drank too much. You're disgusting! 

Michelle, our lovely daughter, always seems to find unique gifts and this time gave her mom a necklace with a cultured pearl that Grammie had to remove from the shell. It was a great gift; wish I'd thought of that!

In Oklahoma, it was so hot we had to run our A/C to sleep. Imagine our surprise when we had to run the heaters in Texas. Damn its cold here, and the wind! Thats not going to stop us from exploring the area. The place to visit is the River Bend center with its butterfly exhibits and natural wildlife area. Doesn't that horse look natural?

Inside the glass building was the butterfly exhibit. This road runner was running wild in the building. It let us get within feet of it before it moved away. Imagine our surprise when we saw it eating some of the butterflies. I can't believe they would put together a whole butterfly exhibit of thousands of square feet just to feed the road runner. Later we found that there was a dedicated butterfly area. Any that escaped were fair game. 

That's a real tarantula. Honest! If you knew my fear of spiders, you'd be duly impressed. I couldn't get Grammie to hold the rattlesnake though. Just kidding! 

Wichita Falls was a huge oil boom town and speculators and con men earned their share. An architect proposed building a skyscraper to rival those in the east. In the heady days of the oil boom it sounded like a good idea and he raised over $200,000. No one seemed to notice the scale was off until the building was built and the architect had absconded with most of the funds. 

Its called the smallest skyscraper in the US. It was supposed to be 12 times larger. He used inches as his scale instead of feet. 

The falls that Wichita was named after was washed away in a flood so man made falls were erected a few years ago. Very pretty.

There is a statue in town that shows the legend of how Wichita Falls got its name. Supposedly, some natives came across the river here and weren't sure how deep it was so a native woman walked across and said it was WA CHI TA, or waist deep. We've seen the river and can believe it. The river's pretty shallow.

When the first world war started, there were only 3 flying schools in the US and one was opened at Wichita Falls, called Call Field (named after a pilot who fell out of a Wright Flyer and fell 100 feet to his death). If he would have hung on, no one would know who he was. Anyway, this is an original Curtis JN-2 Jenny that flew as a trainer during the war. The first Saturday of each month, they take it out for a flight still. Its almost 100 years old, amazing. That's it. The whole museum is based around one plane. I bet they'll shoot the guy who crashes it.