OKC

Brittany and I took a little road trip at the first part of August before she went home to Oklahoma City to visit Jake and BrieAnn and Cora and baby Maggie. It was a lot of fun. Brittany has never been there before and we really wanted to see baby Maggie since we couldn't be there for the baby blessing. It was a quick trip but we had a lot of fun.

Friday night we ate dinner and let the kiddies hang out for a while before we stayed up way to late talking in typical Lund fashion. Saturday we went to a fabulous little antique shop to look around and then went up to OCU (Jake and BrieAnn's alma mater) and also the school of Brittany's musical hero Kristen Chenowith. And she got lucky and was actually able to meet the voice teacher that Jake worked with and will be working with again, who also taught Kristen Chenowith. Her name is Florence Birdwell.
We ate dinner in Bricktown - a cool little neighborhood in downtown OKC that has a lot of restaurants, and shops and music. We are dinner at a great little Mexican place and saw this fun little mural of Oklahoma the musical.

And this was the street sign right outside the restaurant which we thought was pretty funny. Not sure what the signifigance was but it made us laugh.

After we had sufficiently stuffed ourselves silly we went to the Oklahoma City Memorial to look around. It is quite the place to see. Really makes you think about how quickly things can change. And it also shows how great the people of this country really are. When something like this happens we pull together and take care of business.
There is a pool in between 2 of these big gates. They are supposed to represent the moment of destruction – 9:02 a.m. framed by the East Gate - 9:01 a.m. on April 19, and the innocence of the city before the attack. And the West Gate 9:03 a.m., the moment everything changed forever, and the hope afterwards.

These are the Field of Empty Chairs. 168 empty chairs to symbolize the 168 people that were killed that day. They are set up in 9 rows because there were 9 floors and each has the name of one person on it.

You can see that there are smaller chairs for the children from the daycare inside the Federal Building that were killed.

Here is a little wider shot from the other side of the reflecting pool.

There is one wall that "survived" the attack. As you can see not much is left but up close you can see the damage that was done to the wall and there names inscribed on pieces of granite from the wall.
There was also a tree that survived the attack and is now surrounded by a bunch of other trees and a wall that says " To the courageous and caring who responded from near and far, we offer our eternal gratitude, as a thank you to the thousands of rescuers and volunteers who helped."
Across from the tree spray painted on the wall of the museum is this message from the rescuers -
The actual museum with portions of the original wall.

These are tiles that were decorated by children from all over and sent to the museum and are now on display.

This is a statue in front of a church across the street from the memorial of Jesus weeping for those lost.



Britt and I in front of Braum's - best ice cream ever and every time James and I are near one we have to stop. Now Brittany understands why.

We had a lot of fun and really enjoyed getting to hang out with the cousins - I hope they get to be good friends like their mommies.
Thanks Johnson clan for letting us come play.