Tag: outside the metro

Elaine Graybill is sure that the collections at Alva’s Cherokee Strip Museum – where she works as the business manager – make it a must-see among museums in northwest Oklahoma. But whether the museum, located in the building that once served as Alva’s city hospital, includes late-night supernatural activities … well, she isn’t so sure about that. Several paranormal teams have...

Eventually bested in a tug-of-war match with a neighboring community over becoming the McIntosh County seat, Checotah went on to take full advantage of its position at the crossroads of two major highways – and at last report, is doing quite well, thank you very much. The construction of Interstate 40 in the 1960s, and before that, U.S. 69, created...

Candace McCoy and her husband, David, were on their way to possible retirement in Texas’s Hill Country in April 1995 when they detoured through southwestern Oklahoma’s Medicine Park, the one-time spa and resort community that fell into disrepair over the years. It being her birthplace, Candace says they wanted to get a new look at the once-popular town. Despite...

Oklahomans are (quite literally) lighting up the sky to celebrate a joyous holiday season, and nowhere in the state do the lights twinkle brighter than Ardmore, which offers one of the state’s biggest holiday extravaganzas. The awe-inspiring, 1.5-mile drive through the Festival of Lights display in the city’s sprawling Regional Park – complete with an ice rink – is Ardmore’s...

The Big Top hasn’t left town, but Hugo – long the winter home of circus shows – no longer calls itself “Circus City U.S.A.” Although the influence of the fast-paced, three-ring shows that feature clowns, acrobatics and animals remains strong, the Choctaw County seat of about 5,100 has much more to offer than the lure of the circus, says Kelli...

Economic developers who tout a community’s main assets as “location, location, location” surely had a place such as Shawnee in mind. Shawnee, a proverbial hop, skip and jump from downtown Oklahoma City and an easy drive from Tulsa and northern, southern and western parts of the state, is ideally situated, says Stacy Moore, Shawnee’s tourism director. “We’re right in the middle,”...