Thanksgiving Trip to Kansas City

I know..its been a while since my last post, and there is no excuse...got back from my Charleston S.C. trip and it seems time just slipped away...doing some mods on the Casita, work around the house and testing my ability to capture some gophers that are doing a number on my front yard...I'm having a flash back to "Caddy Shack" ...and my outdoor cat has decided to go into retirement....was asking where his annuity check was...oh bother.

Arches..Horst Kelly Photographer

So today we pulled out of the driveway about 1000 hours and the GPS was showing Kansas City, Mo. as a destination...layover Ardmore, Ok....pulled into Ardmore around 1600 and are now relaxing...no Casita this trip.....one major accident which backed things up...lucky for us we where 1/2 mile from an exit and stayed on the access road for a couple miles...I'm thinking some of the folks in that accident where seriously injured and may have died....its never good, but its especially sad during the holidays.....
Ardmore is pretty much a half way point between home and KC...we use to drive it in one day...Why...and we don't anymore
I guess a history lesson about Admore, population around 23000...
Ardmore, Indian Territory began with a plowed ditch for a Main Street in the summer of 1887 in Pickens County,Chickasaw Nation. It owes much of its existence to the construction of the Santa Fe Railroad through the area during that time. It grew, as most frontier towns grew, over the years into a trading outpost for the region. A large fire in 1895 destroyed much of the fledgling town, which forced residents to rebuild nearly the entire town.^[7] In the early 1900s, Ardmore became well known for its abundance of cotton-growing fields and eventually became known as the world's largest inland cotton port.

After the fields were stripped of their fertility, however, the city found itself positioned next to one of the largest oil fields ever produced in Oklahoma, the Healdton Oil Field. After its discovery in 1913, entrepreneurs and wildcatters flooded the area, and Carter County quickly became the largest oil-producing county in Oklahoma, and has remained so ever since.^[8] Ardmore has remained an energy center for the region ever since, with the region's natural wealth giving birth to such energy giants as Halliburton and the Noble Energy companies, among others. Ardmore also learned the perils of being energy-rich with yet another disaster in 1915, when a railroad car containing casing gas exploded, killing 45 people and destroying much of downtown, including areas rebuilt after the 1895 fire.^[9] The disaster, which made national news at the time, gave residents the resolve to establish the city's first fire department to ensure that such events would not recur in the future. The city has not experienced any major setbacks since the 1915 fire, save a 1995 tornado that nearly destroyed the Uniroyal Goodrich (nowMichelin) Tire Plant in west Ardmore. Despite a shift at the plant working at the time, miraculously no one was killed as the tornado ripped through the area, due to the public being alerted by area news and tornado sirens.

On April 22, 1966 just outside of Ardmore was the site of the worst plane crash in Oklahoma history, when an aircraft of theAmerican Flyers Airline crashed and killed 83 people. There is a memorial to the crash just outside of town.

Arches...Horst Kelly Photographer

East Glacier..Horst Kelly Photographer

Ardmore became nationally famous in 2003 when 52 Democratic members of the Texas House of Representatives, known as theKiller Ds, left Texas for Ardmore to deny the Republican-controlled House a quorum when Republicans attempted to pass a redistricting plan for U.S. Congressional Districts. Redistricting of Congressional seats is traditionally done following the decennial U.S. Census; the 2003 plan, which had been engineered by U.S. Representative Tom DeLay (R-Texas), would have been an unprecedented second redistricting in the same decade, and was promoted as a way to increase Republican electoral success. By leaving the state to stay in an Oklahoma hotel, Democrats temporarily delayed passage of the redistricting plan the Republican-controlled House. Republicans eventually succeeded at the re-redistricting, although in 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that new borders of the 25th Congressional District, a long thin chain of counties from Austin, Texas to Mexico, dubbed the 'Fajita Strip', was in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1963, since it divided up predominantly Hispanic areas into multiple districts, and a U.S. District Judge ordered new boundaries favorable to incumbent Democrats Ciro Rodriguez and Lloyd Doggett to be drawn.

^{OK....plan on leaving around 0700 tomorrow morning....BTW those that live in the San Antonio area, the 130 toll road now begins in Seguin, Tx and ends at Georgetown....speed limit for the first section is 85mph....no I didn't reach that speed....there are also feral Pigs crossing the road...have had  in numerous accidents...it's not a pretty sight, auto traveling at 85mph hits a feral hog....Have a great week...till tomorrow...Happy Trails...Horst sends}