Our vacation this year is another cross-country trip east, this time to go to my niece Kelly’s delayed wedding reception and to meet my great-niece Sofia, but of course we can’t leave it at just that. Come along with us.
Most of Saturday, when we left, was about fighting traffic. Because this time we were more interested in getting where we were going rather than how we got there, L sacrificed travel on the red and blue highways, which I prefer, to the interstates. Going up I-35 toward Oklahoma City, we ran into more damn wreck delays than any four people ought to. In Fort Worth, where I-35W was already bottlenecked because of construction, someone had been knocked sideways into a barrier and cleaning up that mess had the entire northbound freeway choked down to a single lane; inching through that burned most of an hour, and then a second wreck outside Tulsa burned another half hour. We didn’t reach the hotel in Springfield, Missouri (our planned stop) until after 9:00 PM.
Our main concession to sightseeing on the way was to plan stops at several state capitol buildings for Alyks, who has a bucket-list ambition to see all fifty of them. We made stops in Hillsboro and Denton to see those courthouses (both late Victorian, both restored and pretty, and something A and I both like) and had lunch at a pub (the Abbey Inn) on Denton’s square. A wanted to go to Recycled Books, which I’ve written about before, but after the Fort Worth delay that just wasn’t gonna happen.
The reconstructed Hill County courthouse, built in 1890 and burned down on New Year’s 1993. Heavy fundraising, including a benefit concert played by Willie Nelson, funded restoration and the courthouse reopened in 1999.
Denton’s Courthouse-on-the-Square. (The county built a new courthouse but kept the old one.) Built in 1895, it is a W.C. Dodson design as is Hillsboro and Granbury.
Hillsboro has also turned the old post office (1912) into the public library, which I feel is much better than tearing down a beautiful public building. Not losing a stout Renaissance Revival-style building with big painted terra-cotta medallions is a Good Thing.
Every post office should have wyverns to hold up the flagpoles.
We got to Oklahoma City after six, which left plenty of sun for taking pictures of the Capitol and the oil derricks and pumps on the grounds (Oklahoma, as an oil-producing state, has both). Oklahoma, being Oklahoma, passed on statues of Liberty or Justice for their dome and instead put a Seminole warrior up there, spear in hand, facing east to guard against invaders.
The statue, executed by a Seminole sculptor and state senator, was put up in 2002 upon completion of the dome.
Next time: we visit three Springfields.
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