The cabins, like many Oklahoma State Parks, were built by the WPA in the 1930's. But, many of them were finished by German POW's during WWII. Gruber was a prison camp. The Teutonic influence shows. Greenleaf Park is directly adjacent to the Camp Gruber military reservation. These cabins are frequented by military families who have a family member deployed to Gruber which is now a national guard training center and special forces training area.
It was a quiet time for us. The cabin had no television or internet so Sheila binged out reading. I also got some reading in. I managed to finally complete a line by line "deep read" of Paul Washer's "The Gospel of Jesus Christ." It's less than fifty pages but packed with thought provoking material.
The lack of television and internet took me back to a better time when instead of constantly taking in electronic information we sat quietly, read and perhaps listened to the radio. In the picture, I am reading from my Kindle E-Book reader which lets me carry a ton of books in a tiny package and doesn't require an internet connection. In the background, I am listening to DeBussy on the tiny but powerful little shortwave radio I carry in my travel bag. As a child and young teen I listened to shortwave a lot. It let me hear the world far away from our humble little rural Oklahoma home.
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I spent quite a bit of time on my micro ham station. I managed to talk to nine states
including Florida and California on a battery powered radio about the size of a couple of packs of cigarettes and an antenna made up of a carefully measured and tuned piece of wire thrown up into a tree. It doesn't take much skill to sit down at home with my sophisticated rig feeding a huge, carefully tuned antenna and talk to both coasts and even South America and Europe. In that case, it's all about the atmospherics. If conditions are right you can talk. But, talking a thousand miles or more with a tiny little field rig feeding a piece of wire hung up in a tree is a bit of challenge. I enjoyed it thoroughly. I found several glitches that I will have to tinker with further.
We ate out a couple of times. We had an early dinner at the Boom A Rang Diner in Ft. Gibson on the way down that is still causing me heartburn a week later. These places must be franchises. We had a fabulous lunch at one out west on one of our previous trips but I would love to forget this one if the heartburn would let me. We had a fabulous Mexican lunch at El Lago in Gore. The place was full of locals from miles around and a steady stream of military from nearby Camp Gruber came in and out. Army and Air Force. I asked for a grilled jalapeno with my meal and they brought me a plate of sliced and cleaned jalapenos fried to perfection. The were delicious and the chile releno with my lunch was outstanding as well ... and huge.
We had yogurt, fruit and coffee for breakfast every day. Easy, quick and no prep. Just make coffee. I always pack several of what I call "MRE Meals" when we travel. These are quick meals that can be prepared with a hotel room or truck stop microwave. The one shown is penne pasta Alfredo with pink salmon from retort packs and an avocado ranch salad from a refrigerator bag.
The cabin had no internet, no television and no cell service. I think the digital fast let us relax. Twice a day we would drive to the top of the mountain to the ranger station where you could pick up a cell signal and check for anything urgent.
It was a quiet, pleasant little interlude, reading, listening to music, enjoying nature and the quiet and above all enjoying each other's company. We need to do this more often.
