On the road again

The second third of Route 66 began for us in Oklahoma City.It's difficult to write about such a journey without making it seem like a travelogue. It's my intention to try to focus on themes of things that happened along the way and the journey of discovery that traveling in a 4WD with three great women friends has turned out to be.
In April 2007 we began our adventure- BB (Before Blogging) utilizing time before and during the school Spring break.
This year Helen and Judy have returned to travel with Sue and I. We all fell back in to our roles Sue- driver, Helen- food and entertainment, Judy- riding shotgun and me- navigator and occasional photographer.
My Nikon camera with the new super duper lens (18mm-200mm) means that within the blink of an eye I can capture images as we do a drive by!
Oklahoma City was warm and sunny on our afternoon there although the breeze whipped up a bit but much better than the rain we experienced as we left there the last time.
The highlight of our day exiting there was the "Cowboy Museum" exhibition of American Indian artists decorated gloves. Items of clothing have for years been embroidered with porcupine quills, bird quills and moose hair onto a variety of objects and surfaces. After the arrival of glass beads and silk thread, Native artists used the new materials and despite their being foreign goods, they soon became identifiers of American Indian identity and aesthetics to both Native and non-Native people. The leather gloves were among the objects adorned with Native beadwork and worn in both Indian and non-Indian communities. Very quickly beaded gauntlets gloves had become necessary components of the western cowboys' fancy dress wardrobe and favorite items of eastern "dudes" who kept them as souvenirs of their western adventures. The numerous rodeo and western pageants founded after 1910 further fueled demand for the gauntlets. We were lucky enough to see 73 pairs of decorated gloves from the design diversity and technical virtuosity of Plains, Plateau and Great Basin Indian artists who produced them from the 1890s through the 1940s.
The other exhibition was of Louise Serpa's photographs. She was raised in the cultural milieu of Manhattan high society. "Her inner-cowgirl," according to one writer, "revealed itself at her debutante ball in 1943 when she rode sidesaddle down the banister of the Waldorf-Astoria and ripped the back out of her floor-length dress." Shein 1946 she eventually moved to Nevada, and after her divorce she needed to provide for herself and her two daughters. What had been a hobby in the early 1950s became a profession for Serpa in the 1960s. In 1963, became the first woman to receive her Rodeo Cowboys Association photographer's card and permission to photograph RCA rodeos inside the arena. Her photographs "give a magnificent overview of the Rodeo that is so much a history of the old West and still is important in the American West today."
We left the cowboy museum behind as we headed for Elk City.