Travels with Flat Stanley: Part I

We didn't get away from St. Jude on Wednesday the 5th until after 6:00 pm.

Sean's class in Memphis did a Flat Stanley project earlier this year, mailing out Flat Stanley's to friends to photograph and send back a journal.

In the same spirit, we made a Flat Stanley to take home with us. We are making a Flat Stanley journal of our trip home to send back to Sean's class in Memphis.

We dragged Sean away from the pool table at Target House, and drove to the hospital to pick up Steven's prescriptions and say goodbye to some friends.

We drove across the bridge over the Mississippi River to Arkansas, St. Jude in our rearview mirror, and went to Russellville, Arkansas before bedding down for the night.

The next day we headed out of Arkansas and into Oklahoma. We stopped at the National Victim's Memorial in Oklahoma City.

It's very nicely done, with two large walls on either end of a large reflecting pool. On one wall is the time 9:01 am, representing the time one minute before the bomb exploded.

On one side of the pool are chairs, representing the people who were killed in the explosion, little chairs for the kids, big chairs for the adults.

On the other side of the pool is another wall, with the time 9:03, one minute after the bomb exploded. On the back side of the wall is a chain link fence, decorated with all sorts of things that people leave there, commemorating the children who died.

Steven was very moved by the display of messages like this one.

Steven decided to leave his hat there, so he attached it to the fence (red and black, directly to his left in the photo).

We headed out of Oklahoma for Texas, where we spent the night in a tiny town called Shamrock, the town's theme centers around St. Patrick's Day, but you won't find any green beer in Shamrock, since like most of the Texas panhandle, Shamrock is in a dry county.

Our previous experience in Texas was not a good one, Doug having gotten two speeding tickets in less than 24 hours, so I did all the driving and managed to avoid any speeding tickets this time.

We couldn't resist making a brief stop in Groom, Texas to see the 19-story, 2 1/2 million pound "Largest Cross in the Northern Hemisphere". This gives rise to the question of what the largest cross in the Southern Hemisphere is.

We happily waved goodbye to Texas and headed into New Mexico, where we visited the Bandera Volcano and Ice Cave. The crater where the volcano was is 800 feet deep, and the ice cave has 20 feet of ice that accumulated in a collapsed lava tube. There is a huge temperature difference between the desert floor at 80-something degrees and the ice cave at 31 degrees or so.

We spent the night in Gallup, New Mexico, and headed out the next morning for Arizona and the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest.

The Painted Desert-- miles and miles of beautifully colored badlands. The Petrified Forest-- the world's largest collection of petrified wood, spread out across the desert landscape, sticking out from the sides of bluffs, beautifully colored.

To Be Continued...

-- Kathleen