Oklahoma – so many people! (the finale)

Telling stories is fun, but if I don’t pick up the pace, we’re never going to get through this Oklahoma series…. here’s my attempt to list everything we did in a rapid-fire number-listing photo-collage frenzy:

1. Arrived in DFW, Chris and Rebekah picked us up at the airport, and we drove to Plano, where we were the guests of honor at an awesome cookout with fun family :)

2. Candice went to a bachelorette party the next day in OKC and had a crazy night out with the ladies; meanwhile, I headed to Ada to catch up with the men.

3. We had another awesome cookout with Candice’s family in Ardmore… lots and lots of kids…

4. We went to Denton to spend time with Chris and Rebekah. We decided to have a night out and go eat somewhere that we couldn’t eat in Cambridge. We were also planning to meet up with some of Chris’ friends and some of our old friends from Ada (Matt and Dana Edmonds). We had a crazy time trying to coordinate where to meet and eat with eight people… which culminated in us finally making a plan to meet at a place in the middle of nowhere out on Hwy 380. When our agreed-upon restaurant decided to be closed on Mondays, we found ourselves desperate, hungry, and ready to pick the next place we saw… which happened to be in the shape of a barn. As it turns out, the barn had great food, country music, a dance floor, and… (that’s right folks)… a slide! What a fun place to find by accident :).

5. Our friends, Jared and Reagan, got married in OKC… we had an amazing time and loved seeing so many old friends. This was essentially the reason we scheduled this trip… and it was worth it.

6. Yet another cookout at my mom’s house… which also happened to be a sort of goodbye to the house I grew up in. Mom has been trying to sell the house for a while… it’s just too big and too much to take care of for one person. I’m proud of her… she got it sold and had another place already picked out. It was bittersweet, though, because I have so many memories from that house… we moved in when I was four years-old… it’s hard to say goodbye. It was especially hard because mom also broke the news that my dog, Bowzer, had died just a few days earlier. Goodbye, House, and goodbye, Bowzer <tear>.

7. Finally, after two whirlwind weeks, it was time for us to go back to Cambridge… but the fun doesn’t end there. Candice’s little sister, Baylee, was headed back to the UK with us for a two-week visit! We all went down to Ft. Worth to Joe T. Garcia’s Mexican Cafe so that Candice and I could have one last taste of sweet Mexican-food glory before heading back to the non-Mexican-food-loving UK. We ate outside, and when it started raining, we cleverly moved to a table underneath the open air pavilion… when the pavilion started leaking, we began to cleverly shift our plates and chairs so that we wouldn’t be leaked upon… and finally, when we were all soaked, we decided we weren’t as clever as we thought. At the airport, we said goodbye, and Baylee came with us… we all changed out of our wet clothes, and we started preparing Baylee for her first trip on an airplane (hence the scared face in the picture below).

That’s all for Oklahoma, folks…