Last weekend my wife came down to visit me while here at BOLC. We have friends in the area which makes the stay cheaper, but it was still over $$$ to have her here. It is much cheaper for me to go visit her, because I have a smaller vehicle and I don’t have to board the dogs.
We went to do quite a bit this weekend. Our first stop was Common Grounds, which is a nice coffee shop here in Lawton. I actually like the coffee better than Starbucks and they have a nicer atmosphere, with free internet. After that we went right to lunch at Atlanta Bread Company. Supposedly the story is that Panera Bread was started by two brothers. At some point they got into a disagreement and one broke off and started Atlanta Bread Company. The food is pretty good there.
Our first stop along the tour was the Winery of the Wichitas (http://wineryofthewichitas.com/mainpage.htm). They have a wine tasting, which if you pay $5, you get to try all of the flavors and keep the wine glasses. We did that and found that we liked the Vignole. It is very flavorful and semi-sweet. The winery has live music on Friday Nights starting at 7PM. You want to get up there before the sunsets I hear, because it has a beautiful view out from it.
We were already in Medicine Park, which used to be a resort. We went on the drive around town, which included some of the touristy spots and houses up in the Big Rock Road area.
From there we went to Medicine Bluff, which is the spot where it is rumored that Geronimo jumped from. We took some pictures there and then moved onto the Fort Sill Museum. The museum is free and open to the public, and has quite a few artifacts of old, some with even Native American paraphernalia. They have plenty of cannons sitting outside as Ft. Sill is the home of the Field Artillery.
Our next stop was back at Emily and Terry's home for a few hours before we went to Rinie's Kitchen and Wine Bar (www.rinieskitchenandwinebar.com). This place had live music, I believe it was a violin. It was a very comfortable atmosphere that you want to dress up for. So we dressed up and went to it. The wait staff is excellent and the food tasted great! It really wasn't as expensive as we thought it would be either. We really enjoyed it.
The next morning we went to Starbucks and met up with our other person for the hike up Elk Mountain in the Wildlife Refuge. I have pictures up on flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/trueblue28/tags/elkmo...)so be sure to take a look at them. So we park at the base of this little mountain and begin our long journey to the top that only took about 30 minutes. The trail was well defined and we talked all the way up about all kinds of things. When we got to the top we walked around and found some areas with beautiful views! The pictures show the views. We saw a buffalo while we were up there all by himself hiding from the wind. We didn't want to go up to him, but we did want to get closer for some pictures, so we worked our way up to about 100 feet away so I could get a couple more snaps of him before we headed back down from the mountain. The trip down was much quicker than the trip up. Then we had a picnic which I still hear I need to take my wife on.