Our Cross-Country Journey (Part 1 of 2)

Part 4 of a Series

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Asheville, NC and the Biltmore Mansion

We spent the night of the 6th of July in Asheville, intending to see Biltmore, the Vanderbilt frontier estate, the next day. When we awoke, though, it was a little too early and a little too rainy to visit there, so we drove around Asheville for a while. We stopped by the campus of UNC Asheville and looked around a bit, read some of the announcements and advertisements on a bulletin board, just to see if any performances caught our interest for that night.

We then drove around some of the residential areas around town while the rain abated. Nearly all the lawns and shrubs were neatly trimmed, and we saw a couple of modest houses, and a few larger houses. I believe this was the largest we saw. At least, it was the largest where we had a clear view of the house through the landscape.

The rain had stopped, so we decided it was time to make our way to the Biltmore Estate. On the road approaching the parking area, guests drive under this overpass, which we later have the opportunity to drive over. The Biltmore asks guests to refrain from flash photography inside, and our snapshot camera was not good enough to get good photos without the flash. However, we did take several photos of the greenhouse and gardens, of which I present two here.

In the space between, I’ll tell a little about our stay in Nashville, TN, and the drive to my hometown of Oklahoma City, OK. I’m not sure whether we stayed another night in Asheville, or left for Nashville immediately after we left Biltmore. What I am sure of is that the Gaylord Opryland hotel (now apparently a Marriott property) is as grand and impressive as any resort in Las Vegas, and I’d be willing to bet that there was no gaming money involved. We went to the Grand Ole Opry show, where we were privileged to see Porter Wagoner and Little Jimmy Dickens, among other Nashville luminaries.

The next day we drove through Tennessee and crossed the Mississippi River (as people do) at Memphis. About halfway between there and Little Rock, we got hungry. We didn’t want to eat at a truck stop, so we took a State Highway exit south into a town of probably no more than 10,000 people. It was Saturday the 9th, so there wasn’t much traffic. We found a local burger joint and had a couple of good, old-fashioned cheeseburgers with fries and onion rings. Well, DW had fries, and I had onion rings.

We went on across Arkansas and Oklahoma, past Indian Nations and Lake Eufala, past the road to Okmulgee and the turnpike to McAlester. It grew dark, but thankfully there was no rain or worse. When I saw the Shawnee exit, I knew we were nearing our destination.

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Oklahoma City – Home, Sweet Home

My first cousin once removed*, Nell Steele, has lived in southeast Oklahoma City for probably most of my life, if not hers. She graciously offered to let us stay with her for a few nights while we visited the members of my family who still lived in the area. We arrived late, or it seemed late, at around 10:30pm, and after an iced tea and a toothbrush we collapsed in the spare room.

A visitor

My cousin Nell

The next day, Sunday, we awoke refreshed and happy. Nell and my own DW made a scrumptious breakfast (while I was still waking up), and we spent the morning talking about things that had happened in the family, both recent and much earlier. We took a few photos, including one of local wildlife (a squirrel in her backyard). We also talked about some things that had happened in Oklahoma City, including the bombing of the Murrah building (more about that later).

Sam, Patsy, and Lloyd

Patsy, her husband R.D., & their son Eli

Later that afternoon, Nell called her brother Lloyd, our cousin Sam, my sister Patsy, and a few others over to visit at her house. We went through a couple of boxes of old pictures, and took a few more. Here are a couple with the people closest to me.


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Downtown, and Grandma’s

On Monday we left the house a little earlier, with a purpose. We were going to visit my grandma’s grave site at the Yukon Cemetery–or as Nell called her, “Aunt Evelyn”. I did take a photo of her and grandpa’s headstone, but I’ve decided not to post it here. I am posting, though, a photo of the Davis family plot at Yukon. I have no way of knowing if these Davises are my grandma’s family, but I thought the proximity was interesting.

We then drove the two miles (1/2 over, 1 down, 1/2 back) to the entrance to the house plot where my grandma lived for most of the years I knew her. There had been a few changes since the last time I was there; one was that the outhouse that I had used as a small child was in even worse shape, with a more pronounced lean. I didn’t get out of the car to check it for daddy-long-legs spiders. Another was that there was now a chain-link fence around the house itself, which presented an odd juxtaposition of new with old.

After lunch at the Braum’s store next to the Walmart on Garth Brooks Blvd. (aka 11th Street), we caught the I-40 freeway back into Oklahoma City. We stopped by downtown to visit the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building Memorial. The 10th anniversary of the building’s bombing had been that previous April; next April will be the 20th. The people who designed and built the memorial did a very good job. Here are a few photos.

Clockwise from top left: looking east across the reflecting pool; looking east on the field of chairs; looking northeast across pool to building on north; a message from responders painted on the north building.

The field of chairs is a lawn with a chair sculpture for each individual that died in the bombing.

I will take time here to note that my sister Patsy, shown in the photos above, was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) about a year before this visit. She died of failures caused by the disease three years later, in November 2008.

The next day we would be on our way across the plains of Texas and the Rocky Mountains of New Mexico, to stay for a couple of days in Santa Fe. Something awful happened there. It wasn’t a tragedy or even anything major, but it did cause me some small amount of consternation.

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*Nell is my mother’s first cousin, my grandmother’s brother’s daughter. As I was choosing the photos to include, I realized that one shows two other first-cousins-once-removed: Lloyd Davis, Nell’s brother; and Sam Irion, her first cousin.