After spending the night in one of Oklahoma’s finer rest stops, we were on the road bright and early. Coming into Oklahoma City, we both wanted to go see what had happened to the Federal Building after the bombing. The building, too damaged to be repaired, was razed and a memorial was put in its place. The memorial was beautiful and terrible at the same time. On each end was a large black structure through which we entered the memorial. Between the two structures was a large reflecting pool, empty because of winter. Off to one side of the pool was a long field running the length of the memorial. In it, there were empty chairs; one chair for each person who died in the bombing. The chairs really hit home when you noticed that there were also smaller chairs, for all the children who died. We happened to be there around 10 am on a cold weekday morning, and for the first 20 minutes had the whole memorial to ourselves. It allowed us (or me at least, I can’t speak for Nate) to sit quietly and think about what really happened. The images were no longer on a TV screen, where I’ve become so accustomed to bad news that they just don’t have the full impact. Looking around and seeing the parts of the building's foundation and the graffiti left by the rescuers, it all became real this many years later. We continued to explore the monument and came upon “The Playgroiund,” which for me was the hardest part of the memorial to see. It was a small fenced-in lawn, which had been the playground for the nursery school. The grass was dead and it could have been any patch of lawn on any city block; I wondered if there had been children playing there when the bomb went off.
Thoroughly saddened, we were back on the road. Not too long after we left Oklahoma for the plains of Kansas (actually, it all looks the same out there) we drove headlong into a snowstorm, which didn’t let up until we were almost to Colorado. Driving through the snowstorm was fine; it was the chilly temps it left in its wake that really got us. By the time we got to our palatial lodgings for the night (the last rest stop in Kansas before Colorado) the temp was a frigid -5 degrees. In Fahrenheit, not that pansy Celsius scale. By the time we woke up the next morning (well, we both actually woke up quite often to put on extra clothes and try to defrost our feet) it was -13 outside and -1 inside the van. I don’t know about Nate, but that breaks my coldest temp record by far, and is about 40 degrees colder than I’ve ever actually slept in. It was a welcome relief to start the van the next morning and turn on the heater (it was also a welcome relief that the van started).