quick trip to Oklahoma City

We had to fit in a quick trip to Oklahoma for a wedding.  When you’re planning all this other travel for a whole semester, it’s kind of strange to think in terms of a 4 day jaunt to Oklahoma City and then to Ada for my nephew’s wedding.  What’s sad about this trip is the fact that the three of us flying from Grand Rapids to OKC cost more than us flying to Barcelona, Spain by triple.  Why on earth is that?  I chose to use all of my southwest points in order 

 to avoid shelling out almost $1000 to fly there and back.  And that was leaving GR at 5:10am.  We decided to not even try to get Oscar to sleep in a hotel to be closer, we were just going to leave the house at 2:30 in the morning.  And hope that he sleeps through most of this trip.  Which does not happen of course.  And we have the slowest shuttle driver in the history of airports getting to the terminal and she tells us that we’re never going to make our flight.  I have the boarding passes on

 the phone, I think, but when we get to TSA, only my boarding pass is downloaded and I have to run to the Southwest desk to get them printed out.  We always check bags on Southwest since it’s free, but this time we didn’t want to be without our wedding clothes, so just thought that we could breeze through to the gate.  So, I arrive back at TSA precheck breathless and we make it to our gate without them even boarding yet, much less about to close the doors

 on us.  We got to sit on the tarmac waiting for the “control tower” at Midway to “open”?  What the F?  Are you telling me that you planned a flight when you couldn’t communicate with the airport you’re flying to?  I find that hard to believe.  But this pilot also let Oscar in the captain’s seat and the copilot had the plane make noises like it was firing guns and talking about stalling, so we’ll forgive the lie on the tarmac.  After watching the sun rise at 

 Midway and having some breakfast, we finally were on our way to OKC which was incredibly easy to negotiate.  It might cost a lot to go to and from small airports, but I have to say that things are easy to get done at them.  We rented a car in OKC and went to the Oklahoma City bombing memorial.  Which was very well laid out, moving and John rated it above 9-11 memorial in New York City.  The hardest part was Oscar asking about all the kids names because 

  we had told him that the smaller chairs represented the kids in the daycare.  Realizing that there were 3 kids in one family there, that a family lost 3 kids in one minute of terror and chaos was heartbreaking.  It was a beautiful site, but in the middle of the heart of a city that probably thought that it was safe, especially before 9-11.  We’ve been vacillating for months about some of the places that we’re going on sabbatical, like Turkey, Egypt and safe countries in the Middle East, but this memorial just brings home the fact that safety anywhere is an illusion.  That was brought home to us in looking at kindergartens for Oscar and one of the selling points at a school being the magnetic doors that lock the kids in in case of a shooting….