This past weekend Chris and I headed for Oklahoma with our Little Travel Notebook in hand for a quick camping adventure near the town of Marietta at Lake Murray State Park. We had a great time enjoying the natural beauty of South Central Oklahoma. You might think of this part of the world as dry and dusty, your mind’s eye filled with images of the dust bowl from your high school history text book, but South Central Oklahoma is anything but dry and dusty today. Our travels this weekend took us across rolling green hills and a beautiful woodlands with tall, broad oak trees providing shade from the warm summer day.
Over the rest of this week we will provide you the details of our travel in Oklahoma and let you ride along vicariously. Here’s a preview of some of the places we visited along with a quick summary of the posts you can look forward to the rest of this week:
- Lake Murray State Park is located just outside of Marietta, Oklahoma. This state park offers great camping, a beautiful lake for fishing or boating, swimming area, and a resort area with a hotel and cabins. We enjoyed the scenery and the easy get away from our home in Dallas.
- Chickasaw National Recreation Area is in Sulphur, Oklahoma is only a short distance away from Lake Murray. It’s great for camping, but also a super day trip with hiking and interpretive ranger led activities. There are some unique swimming opportunities that we’ll talk about later in the week and the park also features a good “junior ranger” program for kids. On our visit Chris and I spent the afternoon hiking up one of the trails along a spring fed creek.
- If you visit the Chicasaw National Recreation Area, don’t forget to stop in the neighboring town of Sulphur. We found a Mexican taquiera during our stop that’s worth the journey. We will post our Taco Traveler review of the exceedingly delicious Abuelita’s Mexican restaurant on Friday.
We covered a lot of ground in one weekend, but there are plenty of other places to visit if you find yourself in South Central Oklahoma. Try your hand at the WinStar Casino on Interstate 35 or visit the Greater Southwest Historical Museum in Ardmore. Four wheeling and horseback riding are also popular options for visitors to South Central Oklahoma. The variety of activities available in the area was an unexpected surprise.
Some quick facts about us:
If your impression of camping is that it either requires “roughing it” in a tent or a super deluxe RV land yacht with it’s own mortgage you should think again. Camping does not have to be an uncomfortable sacrifice or an expensive luxury. Chris and I are both professionals in our 30’s and for most of our camping trips we pull a 19 foot Keystone Cabana behind our 2004 Nissan Titan. It’s a great little camper and has accompanied us for the last year on more than 40 nights of camping and across 3,000 miles of highway. The Cabana is a small comfortable camper with two pop outs that gives a great open feeling and just the right amount of space for the two of us and our dog. Camping is about affordability without sacrifice. That’s what we aim to bring to you with this blog. I hope you will come along with us on this journey.
