Day 13

An early start to spend some time at the Museum of Civil Rights, which is built around the old Lorraine Motel, site of the shooting of Martin Luther King. In all honesty we probably went primarily for this, but the museum itself was excellent - giving detailed, sometimes shocking and frequently moving accounts of the whole history of slavery, persecution and the civil rights movement. We managed to spend a good few hours here before we even got to the room and balcony where MLK fell, on the way witnessing a hilariously camp strop from a man who had been all the way through and come back to find his wife and son still at the first exhibit (Father: “I can’t believe you’re still here! I’ve been all the way to the end!” Son: “That’s because you don’t read anything.”)
On finally getting out ourselves, we realised there was another whole part to the museum based in the building opposite from which James Earl Ray fired the fatal shot, offering the view from the assassin’s room and detailing the investigation and possible conspiracy theories (all rubbish, in our opinion)! This meant that we didn’t end up getting on the road until about 2 having not yet had lunch - not ideal when we’d given ourselves three days to get to Santa Fe and so realistically had a good five or six hours’ driving ahead of us!
Knowing wherever we ended up tonight would probably be in the middle of nowhere, Matthew thought he would be clever and take a diversion towards Tulsa, hoping to find a classic motel located somewhere along Route 66. Unfortunately, the reality was that by the time we reached Tulsa it was dark and we were knackered (although we were rewarded by a beautiful drive down a long road heading straight into the setting sun) and so we decided to plump for anywhere cheap we could find in downtown Tulsa itself. Well, we have never seen such a deader town! No wonder Monica and Chandler didn’t want to move there and Gene Pitney never made it back. Take our advice - 24 hours from Tulsa is probably not far enough!