What a contrast! We’ve spent four nights in Houston and Dallas – in skyscrapers, with a view towards skyscrapers, with windows not to be opened, with constant traffic and hustle and bustle… and now we are sitting on the porch of our „floating cabin“ at Lake Murray/Oklahoma, all is calm, all is dark, fish are jumping up and down from time to time, goose are quacking, crickets are chirping and the sky is full of stars.
The floating cabins on Lake Murray in South Central Oklahoma’s Lake Murray State Park offer a pretty unique accommodation, actually an experience we’ve never had before. The surrounding area was declared a State Park only in 1933 and outfitted with a man-made lake by the CCC under Roosevelt’s New Deal. There are different kinds of cabins, all equipped with cable TV and free internet (what we had't expected!) and we were even upgraded to a larger unit with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, large livingroom and kitchen. We arrived just in time, at 4:45 pm, briefly before they shut down the office, and for the rest of the day we just enjoyed the peace and the location. I dipped into the lake – a welcome cooling at the end of a long and hot day - unbelievable in Germany: swimming in a lake end of October and not needing a sweater even late in the evening!
We’d left our Dallas hotel early for the 2-hour-drive to the Choctow Casino in Durant, our first scheduled stop in OK. On the way we stopped at the OK Welcome Center at the border between TX and OK, but nevertheless arrived early at the casino and explored it before we met with two reps, one of the hotel and one the tribe's tourism department, who introduced us to the place and their plans for the future during a private lunch. Expansion is on the way and they have big plans in regard to offering packages and tours to visitors on Choctaw Nation’s grounds (a huge piece of land owned by the Choctaw indians, including 13 casinos, several sights, bison and mustang herds, forts and indian mounds)and we talked about german tourists' mentality and expectations.
In contrast to many others indian casinos this Choctaw Casino/Resort already has much more to offer than just gambling: they do have a nice inn with a pool area (see pic), they offer spectacular concerts and, what we appreciated most: they have a really state-of-the-art Spa in which we were regaled with 80-minute treatments. Never before had such a good massage for 80 full minutes! My therapist worked hard on all the knots in my neck and shoulders and at the end I felt like newly-born. Peter got a 80-minute facial (!) and afterwards his face was soft as a baby’s bottom.
Though we left the casino rather late (and stupidly refused to gamble with a $ 50 gift card each, while waiting for a left package), we made it in good time to Ardmore and our floating cabin. We didn't have time to shop for a real dinner and since the location is pretty remote, we instead munched away on pork skin chips (never had them before) and peperoni sticks and peanuts from a nearby gas station (a very old-fashioned one, by the way, where you could fill up your tank and pay later at the cashier) and had a pleasantly calm evening on the porch. Seems like clocks run much slowlier in this part of the country, which feels much more like „Real America“ than all the big cities and famous destinations.
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