Saturday, March 24, 2018 - Travel Day to Chickasaw National Recreation Area, Sulphur, OK; The Point Campground; Visit to Sulphur and Chickasaw National Park Office; Gourmet Burgers; Verizon Signal/Internet Connection-Not so Good; Sunday, March 25, 2018

Saturday, March 24, 2018 - Travel Day to Chickasaw National Recreation Area, Sulphur, OK; The Point Campground; Visit to Sulphur and Chickasaw National Park Office; Gourmet Burgers; Verizon Signal/Internet Connection-Not so Good

One of the things I love about the full-time lifestyle is not feeling we have to rush from one stop to the next.  We are enjoying traveling shorter distances, staying longer at each stop and not rushing to leave for our next destination early every morning.  It was near 10 when we pulled out of the park, after stopping long enough to dump our tanks.  

Dean taking care of our tanks before leaving The Point Campground.

Typically, Dean does not like taking interstates, especially near large cities, but looking at the map we think we’re far enough north of Forth Worth we can miss the bulk of heavy traffic especially since it’s a weekend.  Fortunately, that turned out to be the case and we sailed through the area without any problems. 

I’ve been trying to use my camera more since it has such a nice zoom and takes great pictures, so I took a few between campgrounds.

Lake Worth with Fort Worth Downtown Buildings in the background

Speedway on I35N leaving Fort Worth

Oklahoma (see the sign hidden in the trees on the right side).

Winstar Casino in Thackerville, OK.  HUGE!!!  I have always loved Johnny Rivers and he's going to be here in May - so sorry Johnny, I already have plans, but sure would love to see you perform someday.

Beautiful Horse Ranch.

As we near Ardmore, OK the scenery is beautiful.

I originally planned for us to stay at Turner Falls State Park but the fees were higher than we were willing to pay.  We each would have been required to buy a ticket for each day we were there @ $12.50 each, as well as $25.00 per day camping fee.  So, for 2 nights it would have cost us $100.  Our site here with our American the Beautiful Pass is $20 for 2 nights.  It was a simple decision!  We reserved site 52 at The Point Campground in the Chickasaw NRA.  

As we drove into the campground we were hoping we had not made a mistake.  The sites seemed awful small, but as we continued we came to the reserved section (where ours is located) and the sites were much larger.  Whew!  This is one of the easiest sites we’ve ever backed into.  Dean wishes they were all this easy – plenty of room to maneuver the truck, which allowed him to back in the first time perfectly.  

Our site.

Each site also has an area where tents can be set up.  If you enlarge the picture, you can see the raised, flat area behind us.

Neighbors across the road.  See how much space is between rigs. 

The campground is somewhat hilly so I don’t think we’ll be riding our bicycles but I think it will be great for walking and that’s what we plan to do in the morning.  We need to get back into the routine. 

It is so peaceful here.  The park is almost full but we don’t hear anyone even though several are sitting outside their rigs.  There is decent space between sites which is very nice.  We have 50 amp electric and water hookups. 

After we were set up, I told Dean we needed to drive back to town.  I had some letters that need to be mailed and wanted to get it done before I forgot about it.  We found the Post Office and some amazing buildings downtown.  One huge gorgeous building had a sign saying “Artesian” on it, and across the street was a beautiful Chickasaw National Park Service Building.  We first stopped at the Park Building to see if we could get a map and literature on the park we are staying in.  The lady working there was very helpful and pointed out several things to us on the map she provided.  I then asked her about the building across the street.  It is a Hotel with shops, and a Casino is behind it, all built and owned by the Chickasaw Nation.  I also noticed as we drove through town it has some really cute boutiques, second hand shops and even a kitchen store. 

The history of the Artesian Hotel is interesting.  You can read about it here.

Artesian Hotel

Artesian Hotel and Shops - Casino is located behind.

National Park Service Building

The red buds are beautiful in the area.

We left the park building and took a drive through the National Park Service area directly south of Sulphur.  There are a number of springs in this area, both fresh and mineral water.  There are also several trails.  It was pretty warm and we did not bring any water with us so we did not take advantage of any of the trails within this area, but we’d like to in the future.  We visited Little Niagara Waterfall, along with several other beautiful places along the streams running along the park road.  There was a beautiful Veteran’s Lake, with a fishing pier, boat ramp, and roads around it for day use.  Many folks were taking advantage of this beautiful day all through the park.  Many kids and adults were in the springs swimming.  While it was an 80 degree day, I’m not sure the water was warm at all, but they all seemed to be having a great time.  It’s great the park is getting this type of usage.

Little Niagara Falls

Maxx---waiting patiently for us to return.

The water was running over the road.

And this is the amount of water going over the edge!

There were people everywhere enjoying the falls and the water.  It was in the 80's so it was a nice warm day to enjoy the cool water.

Lincoln Bridge

Lincoln Bridge

You can read about Lincoln Bridge.

The trees are so pretty now as they begin to flower.

Veteran's Lake - fishing pier.  Several people were fishing, and getting ready to fish.

Veteran's Lake - there is a path all the way around the lake for walking, with restrooms on this side of the lake.

Veteran's Lake

The redbuds were beautiful!

There were three campgrounds in this area but two of them were closed.  They are for tent camping and smaller RV’s.  However, we discovered there are other campgrounds on “The Lake of the Arbuckles” where our campground is located.  We might check those out tomorrow.  I tried to Google how the Lake got its name but the internet signal isn’t good enough to get a response.   (I checked this morning when I was able to get a signal.  You can check it out here.)

For dinner tonight Dean grilled hamburgers.  We purchased pre-made ones at Walmart.  They were much thicker and tasted much better than the ones we purchased in Waco from HEB.  I picked up a tomato and an avocado to go on the burgers.  We had lettuce, pickles, muenster and cheddar cheese already.  Wow! they were wonderful. 

Fortunately, we are able to receive a bit of a cell signal here, but not strong enough to use our hotspot in order to pull up the blog page to post, or to download the pictures I’ve taken.  I’m hoping that when I get up in the morning it might work better.  I've found early morning you can often get a decent signal until everyone gets up and starts using their phones.  I’m writing the blog in Word and will copy it over to the blog when I can, as well as adding the pictures. We do get simple Facebook posts, Emails if there is not something to download (pictures, etc.) and I just resent a text that failed earlier, but it seems to be working now.  So the internet signal is much better than we expected, but certainly not great.

It took quite awhile to download all of the pictures Sunday morning, edit them, and before I could finish the post, the very weak 4G signal disappeared, and with it my Internet connection.  So I am finishing this on Monday morning before we leave here.  


Sunday, March 25, 2018

Once I lost the internet connection, we decided to walk.  Dean's knee has been bothering him a little.  We decided we'd just walk the loop where our campground is and see how he feels.  Once we completed it, he wanted to walk both loops here in our campground and while he did fine it was beginning to bother him just a little as we returned so we stopped rather than taking a chance of irritating it too much.   We walked just shy of 1.25 miles.

It's a dreary day and we've heard some light rain occasionally.  We decided to fix a big breakfast here in Bentley.  Dean's the breakfast cook and does an excellent job.  We had hash browns (which were perfectly cooked), eggs, sausage and bacon, and biscuits.  You just can't get a better breakfast than what he can cook up!  The deal is if he cooks, I clean up which I don't mind at all for a breakfast like that!

By the time we had finished breakfast, a number of RV's had already left the campground and almost everyone else was in the process of leaving.  By the time they had left, there were only two other RV's besides ours still in the campground.  It was almost full last night.  I guess the rain scared them off.  I was really surprised at the number of tent campers.  There were far more tents than RV's, and two large travel buses were parked in the second loop loading up tent campers.  Interesting!  

We were lazy and just took our time getting around this morning.  At 11:30 or so, we drove to a second campground here on the lake.  We wanted to check out the camping area to see if we might prefer it over this one if we return to the area.  While there were a few nice camping spots there, most of them are smaller sites.  It is a greater distance from town, with some really rough roads getting there.  We definitely picked the better of the two campgrounds for us.

We decided to drive to Davis, OK where Turner Falls is located which is not too far from Sulphur.   We drove by the entrance to Turner Falls and could see there were a few people who braved the cooler day and heavy clouds to visit.  We were not inclined to spend $25 in order to visit on a day like this.  The pictures we saw of the falls are nice but I'd rather visit on a warm, sunny day, if we do.

Back at Bentley, we just hung out for the day.  You realize how much you rely on your phone when there isn't too much to do but watch TV - especially if you are not a TV watcher like me.  Fortunately, there was a good golf game on, then the KU basketball game, and right after that was American Idol.  I made some brownies, and later I made some "Don Blackledge Cinnamon Rolls" for our dinner.  My dad used to make these for me and my sisters when we were growing up, and we tacked this name on to it as we started making them for our kids.  We use canned biscuits, so it's an easy and quick way to enjoy a simple treat.

It warmed up enough through the day we were able to leave the windows slightly open when we went to bed, that allowed a nice breeze to blow in.  There were storm alerts out most of the evening but everything went around us.  The wind picked up a little after we went to bed, but it quickly died back down and I think that was the extent of it for us.  Now as I write this, they are talking about some heavy rain for this area later today.  We will be moving to Ponca City where we will spend three nights.  We plan to meet up with friends later today at our campground and we look forward to that.  Check back to see what else we find to do during our stay there.