Last I posted, we were in the middle of a road trip to New Mexico. The first entry in the series was all about why we decided to take this trip and how we planned it, and the 2nd one covered our first day on the road, and visiting Memphis.
Why we aborted the trip
At the time we planned the trip, we hadn’t looked that closely into the quarantine situation in New Mexico. It turns out they have had a quarantine in place for travelers entering the state.
We discovered this early in the trip, but we weren’t very concerned because our plan was mostly to be indoors working, to cook food for ourselves in our AirBNB, and when we went out, it would be to see nature. Also, they had a rule that a quarantine wasn’t necessary if you could provide a negative COVID test.
However, when we checked in on the situation just before we were supposed to drive to New Mexico, we found that not only had their COVID caseload gone up, but they doubled down on the quarantine restrictions, removed the negative COVID test exemption, and were talking about a larger general shutdown in the state.
Once we realized the seriousness of the situation there, we cancelled our AirBNB for New Mexico, and started to head back to Jacksonville. Since we had only booked AirBNB’s with flexible cancellation policies, we only lost 1 night plus the service fee when we cancelled our 7 night reservation at the last minute.
2nd Day in Memphis
Backing up the timeline slightly, we did finish our time in Memphis and did visit Oklahoma City.
Our 2nd day in Memphis was a bit rainy, which cancelled our plans to walk in another one of the large parks in Memphis (Shelby Farms Park), so the highlight of the day was visiting the Tina Turner Museum about 30 miles outside of town.
It was not part of our original plan, but that morning Caroline happened to be talking to the host of a podcast she will soon be appearing on, and when that person heard we were in Memphis, she told us that a friend of hers ran the Tina Turner Museum, and that it is not too far outside of town.
The museum is part of the West Tennessee Delta Heritage Center, and is home not only to the Tina Turner Museum, but also the West TN music museum, the Sleepy John Estes home, and several other interesting exhibits, inlcuding the history of cotton in the region.
The Tina Turner Museum is actually inside the one-room schoolhouse she attended as a child, which has been relocated 15 miles from her hometown of Nutbush TN, to Brownsville TN, the location of the heritage center. The photo at the top of the page is of a mural painted on a wall outside the museum.
We spent about an hour walking through all the exhibits, and learned a lot about that region of the country. Best of all, visiting the heritage center is free, although we did leave a donation on our way out.
Otherwise, we mostly spent the day working, and I also went on a very scenic run on the V&E Greenline, a greenway located just a block away from our AirBNB.
Visiting Oklahoma City
Our plan was just to spend 1 day in Oklahoma City, arriving late Friday, and leaving early on Sunday, so our time there was limited. But given that it was the weekend, and we didn’t feel the need to work on the weekend, we spent a lot of the day out visiting the sights.
We started the day, though, with donuts, visiting the local place that seemed to have the most buzz and reviews online, Polar Donuts. The donuts were good – Caroline liked them better than I did, but we both agreed the box they came is was the best we’ve ever seen!
National Memorial
Our first stop was the memorial that honors the victims and survivors of the bombing at the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995. We skipped the museum, but walked the grounds, which were very peaceful and moving.
The standout features are:
- the survivor tree – elm tree that stood right in the middle of all the chaos and destruction, but survived
- the ‘gates of time’ – large monuments on each side of a reflecting tool, one etched with the time of the last moment of peace (9:01), and the other etched with the time of the start of recovery (9:03)
- the field of empty chairs – 168 empty chairs facing the reflecting pool, each representing a person that did not survive the bombing.
Botanical Gardens
The next stop was the Myriad Botanical Gardens, located right in the middle of downtown. The grounds are free to walk through, you only need to pay to enter the conservatory.
The gardens were a little too crowded for our liking, because there was a pumpkin patch event going on for the kids, and there were a lot of families and kids walking around. Therefore we didn’t stay too long, but did enjoy the lake area near the conservatory and sat for awhile enjoying the botanical displays, and the ducks and large fish co-habitating in the lake.
Bricktown Canal
Our final stop of the day was the Bricktown Canal. Located just a couple of blocks from the botanical garden, it is an artificial waterway that runs down to the Oklahoma River with nice walking paths on both side, part of which is an entertainment district with restaurants and other leisure activities, and part of it winds through a nearby park.
The canal is about a mile or in length, so we spent time leisurely walking up one side and back on the other side. The entertainment district had lots of entertainment areas, restaurants and bars, and the minor league baseball stadium for the OKC Dodgers is located in the same area.
The other half of the canal was in a nice park, where we saw a larger than life set of statues commemorating the Land Rush when the land in Oklahoma were opened for settling. We also learned a lot from a status and information panels about the Chickasaw Nation, their history and move from their ancestral lands near the Mississippi River to their current home in Oklahoma.
Late in the day, I was able to also go for a run in Bluff Creek Park. The park has a lot of trails, and I found some of them marked with flags and arrows, so started following it. Turned out to be a 1 mile loop around the park, as part of a 24 hour endurance race that was happening that day. The race was comprised of 2 loops, one on the trails and one on the pavement, and offering a 24 hour, 12 hour and 6 hour option. No thanks! Was happy to get a short 2.5 mile run in the books.
Drive back to Jacksonville
For the drive back to Jacksonville from Oklahoma City, we decided to head south into Texas, and then east through Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
I enjoy driving on the back roads whenever possible verses the main interstate highways, and we were able to take a long 6 hour off-highway detour, from south of Oklahoma City all the way to Shreveport, stopping for lunch in Paris! (no, not that Paris – the one in Texas)
I found several other opportunities to take side trips off the main highway. We took several detours onto US-80, which parallels I-20 in Louisiana and Mississippi, and also several detours onto US-90, which parallels I-10 in Alabama and Florida.
The drive back also featured 2 marathon flashbacks for me! As part of my quest to run a marathon in all 50 states (I currently have 17 completed), I ran a marathon on my 45th birthday in Jackson MS, and that is where we spent the night, as it was about halfway. Five years earlier, on my 40th birthday, I ran a marathon in Mobile, AL, and that was the first major city we passed through on day 2 of the drive.
My 50th birthday is actually coming up soon in January, and miraculously also falls on the weekend – a Saturday. Perhaps I’ll be able to find a marathon in a different state to run that day?
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While we were sad we didn’t get to experience New Mexico on this trip, and didn’t get a chance to really test out an extended length of slow travel, we did thoroughly enjoy the trip as it was, and we are sure we’ll find another opportunity to take this trip again once things calm down with COVID.
Another 2655 miles added to the odometer!
We are Scott and Caroline, 50-somethings who spent the first 20+ years of our adult lives in New York City, working traditional careers and raising 2 kids. We left full-time work in our mid-40’s for location-independent, part-time consulting projects and real estate investing, in order to create a more flexible and travel-centric lifestyle. 
Financial independence and early retirement is not something we originally focused on, but over time realized it was possible. Our free report, 
In September, we started talking about a November trip to Southern New Mexico and the El Paso area to do hiking and sightseeing. We saw the NM quarantine requirements, but like you, figured we would be ok since we were going to be at an Airbnb or out in nature doing hikes. As things got worse in El Paso and then across the country, we decided not to take trip. We hadn’t booked anything yet so didn’t have to deal with any changes. I’d definitely like to make it to New Mexico, but it sounds like it might be awhile still.
Glad you were still able to make the most of the road trip and only lost one night of Airbnb fees. I’d like to make it to Memphis one day, and from your pictures, it looks like there are some decent things to see on Oklahoma City.
Probably the right decision, and you’ll get another chance at it some day. We are lucky that there are so many great places to easily visit in the US – endless really! We had no idea what to expect in OKC, and only picked it because it was a good drive stopping point, but we were pleasantly surprised with what we found downtown, between the memorial, the gardens and the canal walk – just beautiful and delightful.