It doesn’t look like it but it is raining and cool this morning. I think Fall is falling. It is about time. We had a pretty mild summer as summers go here in Tulsa but I’m looking forward to cooler temperatures. Autumn is Tulsa’s best season and it lasts a long time.
I was on Google Earth the other day trying to figure out how to get somewhere when something caught my eye. It was a a huge tag looking straight up into the sky with the words “Tulsa” and above it a similarly gigantic arrow pointing west. Below is a screenshot from Google Earth.
I looked at it and zoomed in and out and it looked a little photoshopped to me. You know, just too perfect and too white to be the real thing. By the way that loop road to the upper left of the TULSA sign surrounds a buried water reservoir still in use today. That is why the area is called reservoir hill. That and it is a hill.
So after work naturally I had to run up there and see what’s what. Actually with my bum knee I drove up there and sure enough there is a huge arrow and TULSA sign made out of crushed rock.
It turns out that this is a recreation of another arrow installed right on top of the reservoir back in 1927. It was part of a promotion celebrating a Charles Lindbergh transcontinental flight at that time. It pointed a little to the southeast of the where the present arrow points to which is the Tulsa International Airport. You can see a photo of the old arrow here.
The new arrow was installed a few years ago with some bond money devoted to neighborhood projects. You can read about that here.
It was kind of hard to get an elevated view of the sign and arrow even when I walked up the hill.
I think the whole thing is kind of cool. It is a bridge back to the 1920’s boomtown era and Charles Lindbergh, the oil tycoons that ruled Tulsa then and whose influence is still around today. I had never heard of this arrow before and I pride myself on knowing all sorts of little things about Tulsa.
Do you know any interesting tid bits about where you live that nobody else does?
I had a few hours to myself last week so I went to Oxley Nature Center north of Tulsa’s airport. I only found one cache but the enjoyment is mainly in the looking. I walked up to one of the lakes and too this shot. If it looks familiar it is because it is taken from near where my blog header shot is taken. I’ve probably got two dozen pics of the same scene over the years, summer, winter, fall, spring, cloudy, clear, cold, hot, with Heather and Logan, mostly without. If there is a law against repeat photographs then I’m in for a long sentence.
I’ll have plenty of company though if I’m sent off to blogger jail. The bloggers I regularly read do similar things. A pretty or attractive scene tends to stay that way. What about you, do you repeat yourself a lot? Going back to the same scene I mean.
Oxley Nature Center – Tulsa, Oklahoma Topaz Impressions
It is getting to be late September. Pretty soon the weather will break and Tulsa’s long wonderful Fall season will be upon us. You can already tell that things are changing. Although still hot, the sun is a little lower. The mornings are a little cooler. The sky gets a little bluer. There is something subtle about a cottonwood tree that heralds the coming of Fall. I don’t know if is a subtle change in the color of its leaves or just what, maybe my imagination, but I can tell that things are changing.
How can you tell that the seasons are changing?
Early Monday morning I got up and headed out to Turkey Mountain for my third try at the five mile race “Escape from Turkey Mountain.”
The sun was just coming up when I got there but the place with abuzz with activity. On a race like this the organizers and volunteers have already been out since dark thirty marking the course, putting up the various tents and starting gate, cooling the beer down and getting the food ready. 
The local Fleet Feet Sports franchise sponsored the race. Tulsa is lucky because we have three really good running stores who not only sell shoes and running clothing but also give back to the community in various ways. They all have training runs and various programs to help runners of all experience levels. Fleet Feet though has the best decorated vehicle though.
At 7:15 the hamburgers were already cooking.
The beer was iced down. It was provided by Marshall Brewing. I love craft beers have I ever told you. 
And off we went. The race was jammed up right at first because we were running on trails but after a while we spaced out. I guess that I spaced out too much and at about the 1.6 mile point tripped on a rock and fell on another rock with my knee. It was like ouch. I got up and my knee felt pretty bad so I started hobbling back to the parking lot, dreading the 1.6 miles back but then the knee started feeling better so I turned around after a short while thinking that I could walk it out but I had to climb up a few rocks and the knee started barking at me again so I turned back to the parking lot and got about a tenth or two down the trail and the knee started feeling better so I said what the heck, I have a long walk either way. So I turned around and walked the rest of the race except for a one mail segment where I ran. Fortunately there is not that much difference between my walking speed and running speed (sad to say). So I was able to finish and get some bling and a couple beers or three and a hamburger.
I think I finished near the last. I generally do. Last year I finished 94th out of 96 men. Believe it or not I finished ahead of some people this year. This year I finished 185th out of 204. Which means that nineteen people entered Yogi’s Hall of Shame except two of them were older than me so a net 17 people finished behind me that were younger than me.
At least nobody tried to prevent me from passing them as happened last year.
I appreciate Fleet Feet Sports and all the volunteers who came out to help. The race was fun and well marked.
I’m now at home with leg propped up. Heather is taking very good care of me. I might not be running very much for a week or two.
Promo News Interview before the event
Fleet Feet took pics of the starting line and the finishing line and I think they probably got everybody just in case you wanted to check up on our husband, wife, girlfriend, boyfriend or whoever to make sure they were really there.
A brief video by Fleet Street of what looks to be the finish of the two mile race.
I went on a walk at noon Monday east of downtown Tulsa to the East Village area to see what was new and I found this sidewalk garden. I love it. It is so luxuriant and seems like it is about to take over the sidewalk. Plus I love all the windows and reflections in this section of the street. There is a lot happening downtown especially in the close by neighborhoods. There are all sorts of small businesses taking over and renovating formerly run down properties. Condo conversion and new construction is happening. It is quite the frothy mix. Downtown Tulsa is becoming a cool place to be.
I processed my original photograph with Topaz Impressions’ “Cezanne 1” filter blended 60% with the original photo.
I’m linking with Digital Art Meme
Monday, after work I took Logan to his voice lessons. The studio is in an old strip shopping center and I like to walk around rather than sit in the waiting space. Last week I featured a recently abandoned Shell Station at the center. Well guess what, there is another abandoned Gas Station a couple hundred yards south of the Shell Station. I think it has been boarded up ten years or so. I forget what chain had the site.
They left their old sign up and I always get a chuckle out of it.
Since the station went out of business the prices listed have sometimes seemed like a huge bargain or a big ripoff. Right now they are just a moderately good deal.
Linking with Signs, Signs
This is Pepsi Lake on Turkey Mountain from back in May. Great year on the mountain with all the rain that we got plus it got saved from an outlet mall that was proposed and then cancelled. There was a huge surge in popularity that resulted with all sorts of new people tromping all over the place. Things have died down quite a bit with the heat of the summer and school starting so I’m back to seeing very few people during my weekly run.
Last week’s post on Turkey Mountain was taken from across the lake from this photo and a little to the right.
Where is your go to place to relax?
Shell has closed one of their local gas stations but I still love that big canopy.
I used Topaz Impressions to process this photo.
Late afternoon last Wednesday on Tulsa’s Turkey Mountain at a small pond. I just love running the trails there. Once I get more than a quarter mile from the parking lot I have the whole park to myself. One thing about the area is that there is not a whole lot of money budgeted for maintenance. We depend on volunteers to show up and do everything from clear downed limbs from trails and pick up trash. But if a tree falls over into a pond. So be it! It is part of the wildness that we love about it.