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Published: March 26th 2008
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Obfuscator writes: We left Norman, and our gracious host R, before it got too late in the morning. Onaxthiel was glad to be away from cats, though as it turned out, that relief would be short-lived. We drove south, with Dallas as our intended destination for the day. Along the way, we started getting distracted by roadside billboards that kept advertising interesting sounding things.
In the town of Paul's Valley, OK, there's a Toy and Action Figure Museum. We detoured for a while to check it out, but found that at 9:30 AM on an Easter Sunday morning, surprise surprise, it was closed. It looked like it might have opened up at 1:00 PM, but we didn't really feel like waiting, so we moved on. Judging from what we could see in the front windows though, it truly stood as a monument to our childhood. We wanted badly to see it.
We continued south. About 10 miles further south, we found something called G.W. Exotic Animals Park. Now, allow me to preface everything I'm going to say about this park with the disclaimer that I don't know the veracity of any of the park's claims. G.W. Exotic Animals Park
claims to be an exotic animal rescue, a park that takes exotic animals out of bad situations and homes, and attempts to rehabilitate them, and when possible, get them placed into good zoos.
The park has a huge collection of animals, including various types of lions, tigers, and bears. Oh my. They also have wolves, hyenas, alligators, snakes, kangaroos, deer, and various birds. These animals all bear some testimony to abuse. Some of them are partial amputees. Some have wicked scars. We saw a bird with only half a beak. We didn't see any evidence in our short visit that any of this mistreatment came from this park, and there were signs everywhere explaining what awful circumstances each of the animals came from. The only sad thing we did observe there was that none of the animals had the size or quality of habitat that they would in a zoo.
I imagine it's a tough situation though. Each of these animals requires substantial care just to maintain or rehabilitate. If they aren't getting it in their original homes, it's good to get them out, and if there aren't zoos or anything that want to adopt them right away,
or can't afford them, than I imagine these animals slip through the cracks. Getting bigger and better habitats would cost a fortune, and it's simply probably outside the reach of the park.
After we left the park, we drove south for another ten miles or so, until we arrived at Turner Falls, a city park. Turner Falls is basically a natural water park. When we were there, water levels were a bit elevated, which made it even cooler. The falls themselves are 77 feet tall, and cascade over rocks in a rather pretty way. All around the falls, the cliffs are dotted with neat little caves that you can hike around. The river runs through shallow canyons, and the clear, aqua-colored water pools and rushes over smooth rocks and into pleasant looking pools. It was a bit cold to be swimming, but we concluded that this place would be great in the summer.
There's also some neat ruins of a 1930s castle. Built by a rich professor, and occupied through the 30s, the castle has several buildings and semi-hidden passages. The layout was unconventional, but awesome. It was too bad that the castle had been allowed to fall
into such disrepair. It must have been quite the place in its heyday. We walked around the park for quite some time before getting back on the road to Dallas.
In Dallas, we headed downtown, hoping to check out the site of JFK's assassination. There's a museum called “The Sixth Floor” in the old Book Depository, but they wanted about $15 per head, and we only had about an hour before they closed, so we decided that we didn't REALLY need to see that room. Instead we walked the grounds of the assassination, and the grassy knoll. Now, in case you're a conspiracy theorist, let me tell you right now, unequivocally, that conspiracy theories about the assassination are terribly thought out. I know JFK told us that the shot couldn't have come from the Book Depository, but JFK was a hack-job. The shot from the book-depository wasn't even a challenging one. The shot from the grassy knoll, however, would have been taken from about 20 feet behind the throngs of people. It would have been impossible for people not to notice. At any rate, it was a pretty interesting place to walk around, and it was a nice day
to see it.
After that, we headed to a motel and began the long upload which we had been putting off for some time.
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