Home Sweet Home

I love to travel to new places, but one of my biggest travel priorities is making plenty of time to go home and visit my family back in Oklahoma. I needed to leave home and strike out on my own for many reasons, and living in DC has worked out incredibly well so far. However, I miss my people every day. My entire immediate family, minus one cousin, lives within a 2 hour radius in Oklahoma as do many of my closest friends. They are the people who know me the best, love me without condition and just generally fill my heart with love.

We went home for my mom’s birthday, as well as a Halloween party at my brother and sister-in-law’s. I never do a great job of taking photos when I’m home, because I’m having too much fun catching up with anyone, but I tried.
^ The Oklahoma City Skyline from the rooftop bar at the Ambassador Hotel.

It was a very short trip. We arrived on Friday, took my mother out to dinner at Junior’s Supper Club (a delicious and nostalgic experience – the place hasn’t changed much since the last time I was there for my sixteenth birthday). Saturday, we went to my hometown to visit my sweet grandma. That evening was the Halloween party.
^ The flat plains of Oklahoma make for some seriously good sunsets.

My brother and sister-in-law live in a neighborhood that takes Halloween very, very seriously. Almost every house on her street had extensive spooky decorations. A place nearby even had a working Frankenstein laboratory.
Dressing up is not my forte. I’m just not a creative person in that way. So I wore penguin onesie pajamas and called it good.
^ I was hunted most of the night though, it was rough. 😉

The party was a huge success. My sister-in-law is a master party thrower. I would have been a complete mess having that many people over, but she planned it perfectly and it went off without a hitch.

It was a late night, and a bit of a rough start the following morning but incredibly worth it to spend fun times laughing with the people I love. The next morning, we packed up and headed over to the Boom to meet my mom and her friends for a hilarious drag brunch at The Boom.
^ Mom got special attention since it was her birthday.

The show was great and the food hit the spot, but we weren’t able to stay a minute past the end of the show, since our flight back to DC left in the early afternoon.

These trips aren’t about seeing sights, but about seeing people. That said, Oklahoma is a great place. If you’re ever looking to visit, I can provide some excellent recommendations of places to see, stay and eat. Perhaps I will write up a post to that effect one of these days.

Short trips home are hard. It’s hard to fit everything in we want to do, and hard to say goodbye, but it’s a blessing each and every time we’re able to go. We’ll be back for a longer trip at Christmas, so I have that to eagerly anticipate.