Urban Journey 01

Today I had to make a trip to the Oklahoma County Courthouse. That’s downtown OKC, about ten miles from where I live now (we moved recently). The satellite image is courtesy of Google Earth showing the route. Yes, it could have been straighter, but there’s no fun in that. This route was specifically chosen to avoid motor traffic as much as possible.

My residence is on the backside of Rose State College. There’s a gateway cut through a shared fence between my apartment and the Health Sciences building. However, it was dark and I couldn’t get a good picture until I was almost back home. Depicted here is the new student services center.

This is one of the nice, quiet neighborhoods on the route. This one is called “Midway Village” — midway between Mid-Del (Midwest City-Del City) and OKC. I pass through here often enough that some residents and even dogs recognize me on sight. It’s the best way to get to one of the connecting trailheads of the OKC Trails system. The Mid-Del city governments are lagging a little on funding and building the matching trail network.

This is the entrance to Eagle Lake Park, where one of the trail connections stand. You can ride through a narrow gate that lets riders follow a rough dirt double-track to the edge of the city limits, which is where I pick up the Eagle Lake Trail built by OKC. It follows along the south bank of the Canadian River, which is where I got badly hurt a few years ago.

This is the start of the Eagle Lake Trail, showing the bridge over Crooked Oak Creek. On the other end, the trail loops around and under to follow the river bank. It doesn’t see a lot of traffic, so Parks and Rec don’t maintain it that well. I’ve done a lot of vine cutting along this bike path, because they poke through the fence along the high side of the bank.

At the Eastern Avenue crossing, the Eagle Lake Trail dead ends at a construction site. It will be months before they reopen the bike path farther along that south bank of the river. Meanwhile, this is where I cross the river to the north bank and ride the new Greenway Bike Trail that takes me right past the Oklahoma River Adventure area, also known as the “Boathouse District”. During warm weather, all of these fancy facilities are open to public use. Prominent is a water slides there in the middle.

This puts us just outside of the Bricktown District and to the southeast of Downtown OKC. You can see our few skyscrapers in this view. Honestly, it’s not as fancy as plenty of other cities, but it’s not bad for a old oil and farming town. The old grain elevator on the left now houses a rock-climbing facility. However, most of the former agricultural structures are long gone, moved out from the city center.

This is just about the fanciest structure in Downtown OKC. This is at the base of that massive Devon Energy Tower. It made it to national news once because a weirdo climbed it without ropes once, and another time when some maintenance workers got caught in a window-washer cart that had come loose from its mooring line up near the top of the tower. They were whipped all over the place in high winds, and one was badly injured. The others simply thought they were going to die.

This is the old County Courthouse. It really is used for almost nothing else but court hearings. There is a very substantial more modern tower behind it (obscured by the trees here) where all the offices are. All of this so I could get a copy of my marriage license, which in turn was required to get some other government document necessary for normal life. Once I had them, I pretty much took the same route back home.

I like to turn things like this into an adventure.