I Like #302

 This was really a wonderful wonderful week.  My friend Carolyn was here visiting from New Zealand.  She and I became good friends in college, but hadn't seen each other apart from Zooms since 2003 (way to make me feel old).  She's also very good friends with a friend of mine here, another geologist from OU.  Carolyn came and Brett and I spent about 5 days with her, some here in OKC and some down in the Wichita mountains.  It was really wonderful.  I haven't laughed this much in I don't know how long.

We started on Friday afternoon at the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History.  It's a great museum, full of wonderful fossils and other exhibits, but the best part is that Brett organized some vertebrate and invertebrate paleontologists from the Department of Geology to give us a backstage tour.  It was so amazing to see all their wonderful specimen rooms and museum storage and collections and all the fantastic fossils!!  The three of us are very nerdy, and the fossils were very cool.

We left for the Wichita National Wildlife Refuge on Saturday morning and had great hiking all weekend.  We got rained on a little bit, and then on Sunday it poured for a couple hours in the middle of the day during which we went on a search for the Meers Fault, but by and large it was really great.  The wildflowers were just gorgeous, better than I've ever seen them.  We saw lots of wildlife, only a couple of ticks, and stayed at a lovely airbnb with a wonderful screened in porch and good air conditioning.

We did the Charon Gardens hike (one of my favorites) on Saturday, and saw a wonderful eastern collared lizard.  They're so colorful!

Since Carolyn and Brett are both geologists we learned and talked a lot about the rocks of the area, and made a little side stop to see these diabase dikes,  where the black diabase (black stripes in the foreground and up the cliff face) intruded into the granite.  Apparently in this case, in some places the diabase intruded before the granite had fully cooled so the diabase could sort of blob off (like in a lava lamp).  Very cool.

On Tuesday we went to the OKC Bombing Memorial and Museum.  I'd never been to the museum, it was a wonderful museum, but very moving and sad.

We'd taken Carolyn to a pretty hole-in-the-wall-but-super-delicious bbq place down in the Wichitas, so on our last night we skewed widely in the other direction and had drinks and appetizers at Tellers, a restaurant in the lobby of the gorgeous historic First National Bank building.  It's filled with wonderful art deco details outside and in.  It makes me feel fancy just walking in.

And we wrapped up her trip with a OKC Dodgers baseball team.  It was fun, relaxing and they won!

It was just such fun to get to see her and have a wonderful long weekend with the three of us.  So much laughing!  

I hope there has been some laughing in your week!  Click on over to LeeAnna for more things to like!