Carrie and I learned three important things on the second day of our trip:  Oklahoma is much less flat than we thought; Oklahoma is exactly as flat as we thought; and Carrie gets mild elevation sickness. Also that we can't be bothered to look up the elevation of our airbnbs, which is I guess four things.

And fifth-ly, from one of our Bristow hosts, Bob:  Prague, Oklahoma (pronounced in perfect midwestern: PRAY-g) is home to a sizable Czech population and has a great bakery with a whole whole bunch of kolaches.

Carrie has had a book, "one thousand things to see before you die," for quite a few years.  I think we're on thing six or thing seven, which isn't a great grade, percentage wise.  Anyway we decided to add an eighth thing: the Witchita Mountains Wildlife Refuge in central-ish Oklahoma.  It's an hour or so detour off of highway forty.

The wildlife refuge is home, in addition to the wildlife, to the Witchita Mountains' highest peak:  Mt. Scott.  It rises dramatically above the somewhat boring floor of Oklahoma to something like twenty two hundred feat.  It's a pretty neat sight:

It was fairly cloudy when we arrived in the early afternoon, but it was still pretty fun to poke around inside of a cloud, looking at rocks and this juniper tree.

We ended up spending like three hours here, driving around to see animals, getting out of the car to see animals, and hiking and hoping not to see (dangerous, snake-or-scorpion) animals.

Most exciting -- and the single most-photographed subject of our trip -- was a section of the park marked "Prairie Dog Village" which turned out to be a literal prairie dog village.  We both thought it was a cutesy name for an administrative building or something until we got there.

Finally, there were some narrowly-winding, can't-see-it-more-than-the-next-ten-feet hiking trails.  We took a short saunter (thanks, Kathleen!) and invented chants for the tall-grass areas like "rattle snakes go away, come again another day."  If that sounds familiar it's because our imagination was focused more on scary snakes than inventive counter-spells.

I love the hills, mountains, and mesas rising around our car off in the distance, haunting the highway -- and often with spots of sun and shadow thrown around. Western Oklahoma, however, is flat.  And the top-part (I guess the "pan-handle" but what a ridiculous visual metaphor if you look at Texas on a map) of Texas is equally flat.  And the easternmost bit of New Mexico is also pretty flat, at least until it is decidedly not anymore.

And if my writing is a reflection of the beautiful and varied landscape that we're passing through, this is about all that I can say for those particular places.

Although flat, the eastern edge of New Mexico is one long slow climb up to Albuquerque.  Our airbnb there was actually on the eastern edge of town, up in the Cibola National Forest.  We had to do a bit of off-roading on a bumpy, winding dirt path to get to Casa Canoncito, which is a beautiful house tucked in the hills.

Carrie was feeling a bit off all of that day, and felt worse going in to the evening and following morning.  We found out that not only is Albuquerque higher up than Denver, we'd traveled a further thousand-or-so feet up to 6800 in what is probably the highest spot we could have picked to stay that evening.  Common wisdom for mild elevation sickness is to sleep somewhere lower.  This is not particularly helpful common wisdom for us at the time.

It was dark when we arrived -- around ten, mountain time -- so our ascent was exciting and a bit mysterious.  Before getting tucked into the hills, we could see the lights of Albuquerque spread out below, shooting off toward the horizon.  Unfortunately these views don't translate well to static pictures so you'll have to visit yourself sometime.