Oklahoma City February 2007

This year for my birthday I received an "overnight trip" to the place of my choice. We originally planned to go to Austin but there was something going on so we chose Oklahoma City instead. I was still going to school so we had a very small window of opportunity.

The main thing we wanted to see was the Oklahoma bombing memorial. What an amazing and moving sight.

On April 19, 1995, the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City was bombed. 168 people were killed and many more left injured. There's a museum there where you can see some of the items that were found in the rubble. Shoes, glasses, baby shoes. There was a day care center on site. There's also a tape. There was a hearing going on in one of the court rooms and you can hear the explosion and the panic. Then they had all the news reports going.
This is an image I found on the web of the building after the bombing. There were also people recording their stories (at the museum). There were stories of the rescue workers, the doctors and the people that were looking for loved ones. It was really hard to listen to.

I remember when the bombing took place. I was working in downtown Dallas at the time and I was one block over from the Earl Cabell Federal Building. That was pretty scary. On the radio they kept saying that the Federal building had been bombed and the people in Dallas were afraid that our Federal building would be bombed as well. The next day, you couldn't get near that building.

The outside memorial is where the building stood. There is one chair for every person that died that day. All the small chairs are for all the children that died. There's a reflecting pool in the middle. The two walls on either edge have the time - one side has one minute before the bombing and the other side has one minute after. It's to show how the world can change in that small amount of time.

The white underneath the chairs are lamps. They light up in the evening. It's beautiful.
Here's the wall. There's one on either end of the reflecting pool. You can kind of see the time there at the top.
This tree actually survived the blast.

The trip was really nice. We stayed downtown at the Sheraton near an area called Bricktown. Back in the day, this area was filled with blues and jazz clubs. We walked everywhere, which was great because we ate a lot.

On Sunday, we went over to the museum of art where they had an exhibit on Napoleon. That was really cool.

We didn't stay too long on Sunday. After the exhibit, we headed back home. It was a nice little interlude.