Before we left Dallas, Robbi’s parents kindly treated us to breakfast at an Ameri-Mex restaurant, which was the sort of place where you could very easily have some Tabasco to put on your eggs. We opted for pancakes as we hadn’t had them in months (hotels have lots of waffle makers, but no no pancakes in our price bracket). It was very good and highly recommended.
We rounded off our time in Texas by seeing one of the many Roadside America items – giant, fiber glass people, at least one of which was a cowboy in Gainesville, Texas:
We entered Oklahoma and chatted with someone who told us that she was part Native American and that living in southern Oklahoma, she felt southern, but she thought once we reached Oklahoma City, they would be something else. We also learned that most Indian nations were forcibly moved to Oklahoma during the 1800s. I had been aware of things like the Trail of Tears, but not that Oklahoma had been Indian Territory rather than a state for quite a while because of this.
We stopped by the Chickasaw welcome center and learned that despite all the horrors that had happened to them, Oklahoma no longer has reservations for the Native Americans, but instead there are now 39 sovereign Indian nations (and they did use the word Indian on their official state published booklet) within the state of Oklahoma that make and enforce their own laws with the help of the federal government and the state of Oklahoma.
Do check out the video to hear a bit about Native America:
We ended our night in a hotel by the airport in Oklahoma City. It was acceptable and next to a chain we’d seen a million times, but never tried, Cracker Barrel. It was one of the better ones in that it was cheap, tasted pretty good and felt much less unhealthy. We were even both able to eat vegetables and play giant, outdoor checkers afterward:
