Day 210

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Posted by: Onaxthiel: Since I am all strung out on Benadryl this morning, I'm having Obfuscator drive this morning, so that any micro sleeps on my part won't have any critical effects.
Yesterday started out in Greenleaf state park, the finest of the OK state parks we have seen on this trip. The facilities are good, with hot showers and reasonably sized and equipped camp sites. The grills and abundance of firewood in the wood line meant that we were able to cook easily without cutting into our carried supply of combustibles. The terrain around the park is lovely, as is the whole of eastern OK, a region dominated by rivers, valleys and bluffs. We wanted to make it back towards OKC in the afternoon, so we had decided to only make one stop for the morning. This was the Heavener Runestone, an oddity found in the hills surrounding the town of Heavener. The runes are carved into a massive rock in a small hillside creek overlooking the town. A local woman was shown the rock back in the thirties by her brother and father, and devoted the rest of her life to finding out how the carved letters got there. The petroglyph's were known prior to that time, but the settlers in the region had just assumed they were Indian carvings and the rock was referred to as Indian Rock. Supposedly, the Indians didn't know where the carvings came from either, but their oral traditions spoke of knowledge of the existence of the carvings dating back until at least 1830. In the 1950's, after sending off photos and copies of the runes all over the world, the researcher finally got an answer back from a professor in Denmark. The carvings were an example of Elder Futhark, a text used by the vikings between the 7th and 9th centuries. The runes read “Glome Dal” which would translate as Glome's Valley, and would have been used as a property marker in the old world. The theory advanced at the park is that a group of Danes came across the north Atlantic, navigated down the eastern seaboard, and then came up a series of rivers until they ended up in the back hills of Arkansas and Oklahoma. Perhaps it is the case. Or it could just be an elaborate hoax. With no specific archaeological evidence to support the claims of the theorists, it may always remain a mystery how they runes arrived here. The other great mystery of the site was where the Easter Eggs could be found. The park was hosting a big hunt for all the children of the area, and from the time Obfuscator and I arrived in the park to when we left around eleven, we went to being the only visitors to being outnumbered by hundreds of children, to say nothing of parents. Heavener takes it's egg hunts seriously. A few miles north of town on highway 59 was the cheapest gas that we have seen in the last three months. It was the first gas under three dollars a gallon in about that long, too, all from a tiny little independent station. Then we made the mistake of having Wal-Mart change Road Warriors oil, costing us a few hours longer than it should have. We finally arrived in Oklahoma City about three hours behind schedule. This made it impossible for all the friends of R and D that had come over to play a game of zombopoly, as they had other places to be. It's to bad, since the four person game we ended up having was quite a lot of fun in the end. The night wound down, and we crashed at R's place for the night, with me on high doses of Benadryl to keep from dieing in the presence of her cats.

Lessons learned: the further east you go in OK, the lower the gas prices get. Useful information if you're passing through the area. Wal-Mart is pretty reasonably priced for Oil changes, and they were conveniently located, but they take WAY to long on the operation to let them do it a second time. I am never trying to sleep in a house with cats without massive doses of anti-histamine again. Life was so much easier once Benadryl kicked in.

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