A friend of ours is flying out to visit her sweetie, who is stationed at Vance AFB. They have a few days to do day trips and the like. So I throw it out to our Oklahoma Dopers: What the fuck is there to do in or around Enid? I’ll take any recs - restaurants, scenery, events over Memorial Day weekend, anything.
Yeah, Enid is kinda in the middle of not much excitement. If your friends like caves, Alabaster Caverns State Park is about an hour and a half drive west and a bit north of Enid. It’s the largest gypsum cave open to the public in the world. The trip to the caverns takes you up on the Blaine Escarpment - also known as the Glass Mountains, or Gloss Mts. as stw004 said.
On the west side of the Great Salt Plains Refuge, you can dig for selenite (gypsum) crystals. The crystals are just beneath the (salt-covered) surface - not much digging is required.
ETA: If you stop at the little pullout on Hwy 412 at Glass Mountain State Park, you can find very transparent pieces of gypsum lying around. Watch out for rattlesnakes there.
OK, let’s expand the question. What’s there to do in Oklahoma City or Tulsa? Maybe I can sell them on just heading away from base for the weekend. Any good restaurants? Plays? Hootenannies?
OKC has the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. It also has an excellent zoo close by that museum at Remington Park. There’s a track at RP as well - don’t know what the horse-racing schedule is, though.
I haven’t eaten in OKC for quite a while. There’s Cattleman’s south of downtown - well-known steakhouse. Used to be a lot of good Vietnamese/Thai/similar places west of downtown along 23rd Street.
Of course, OKC also has the Oklahoma City National Memorial. It’s downtown and is a stirring and inspirational place to visit.
IMO, Tulsa is bit too far to drive for the reward level upon arrival.
Excitement is in the eye of the beholder. I always liked driving through Oklahoma but you have to make most of your own entertainment. Restaurants and bars in some of the smaller towns can be a hoot. Most of it is fascinatingly flat which gets old after a while but is kind of surreal for a day or two. It is also in the heart of tornado alley. Don’t complain too loudly that the place is boring with nothing to do because that is what makes god darken the skies in a hellish fury and turn the blender on. Nobody ever claimed they had a boring day after seeing an Oklahoma thunderstorm let alone a close encounter with a tornado.
I don’t know if it’s still the same, but back when I was traveling through there regularly, there weren’t any bars in OK City. There were all sorts of BYOB places where you had to take your own after picking it up at a package store. Bars were outlawed. Maybe it was that way in the whole damn state! Might want to check into that.
You could go to church in Tulsa. It attracts all sorts of fringes. I heard an old high-school friend of mine in Texas ended up there, founded some sort of End of Times church.
Liquor by the wink has been gone for quite a few years now. Normal quantities and varieties of alcohol, wine and beer available in all bars, restaurants, etc. The Hanson brothers (M-m-m-bop) just last Saturday sponsored a hop festival in downtown Tulsa. Apparently they’ve started their own microbrewery.
Some of the best salsa in the oklatex region, and a pretty good med price lunch menu. Dinners cost between $12 - $24, lunches as low as $7 or so. Besides the regular TexMex fare, they have some specialty dishes that are very tasty.
Eskimo Joe’s in Stillwater is restaurant with a reputation and I don’t remember why. It’s been about 20 years since I’ve been, but it was one of those “we have to go there” places.
Like Hideaway Pizza, it was one of the “cool” places to go in the 80s-early 90s for both students (OSU) and tourists. Esk Joe’s has karaoke, good wings, and a souvenir shop that rivals Disney World. Their t-shirts are even sold in local stores at the malls in OKC and Tulsa. Probably in Lawton, Altus, Ardmore, and McAllister too. I think they have a liquor license, too (I remember seeing drunk people).
Hide Away Pizza has sites throughout the state now, and that is some good pizza. Not NY, not Chicago, but a nice mix. The Big Country pizza is a meaty heart attack!