Sunday Salon: Bullriders, Elephants, and Learning a New Technique

 The Sunday Salon is hosted by Readerbuzz

It was Spring Break this week so we took two small road trips road trips with Atlas before he went to spend the rest of the week with his mom. 

The first trip we made was mostly for me, but he got something he wanted to do out of it also!

In the late 80s I was such a fan of Lane Frost. If you don't know who he was, he was a professional Bullrider who was around my age and he was from around Atoka Oklahoma. In 1989 he was killed while riding a bull in Cheyanne. If you have watched the movie 8 seconds with Luke Perry, you watched a movie about the life of Lane Frost. 

Lane is buried on Hugo Oklahoma at the Mt Olivette Cemetery, it's not horribly far, about 2 hours, but I have just never gotten around to going and have always wanted to go. Also in the cemetery is a section called Showman's Rest, which houses many graves of past circus performers, as Hugo has been the winter home of several circus's since the 1930. Atlas really enjoyed seeing all the different circus graves.

This is the front of Lane's grave. We enjoyed seeing all the various items that people have left on the grave. Lots of spurs and coins, but also things like boots, shoal, and lots of plastic bulls. As in our tradition we each left a rock on top of his grave. ( this is probably actually the back of his grave, it's hard to tell. This faces the road

This is the other side of the gravestone. I tend to think this is the head, as you can see in the first picture some one is buried right in front of him. This side has two pictures of him and also a sweet note from his then wife. Also not pictured is a foot-stone, which I am guessing lays at the foot of the coffin, which is why I think this is the front.

Anyway, it has been a dream of mine to see this for many years and I am glad I finally made it down there.

These elephant statues give the perimeter around the circus part of the cemetery. They still had red white and blue bows on their trunks from Memorial Day

This is a big monument tell you what this part of the cemetery is. I didn't see any mention of it being a grave.

An example of one of the graves. There were so many. A lot of elephant trainers that had elephants marching across the marble, One had a quote from Horton Hears A Who. Just so many neat stones.

Atlas really liked this one for Popcorn the Clown

Now on to what Atlas wanted to do while we were down this far. ...

We had to drive through the town of Atoka to get to Hugo and there are two things that he really likes to do while in Atoka, and honestly the only reason we ever come down here about twice a year. One is to go to Frost Ranch Wear, which is the Western Store of Lane's family, and in the store they have so much memorabilia from his career, that it is also like a museum of sorts. So he stops in looks at all the stuff and usually buys a a shirt, he loves the brand Cinch, and Wrangler. 

But his favorite thing to do is go to Reba's Place for lunch. Reba McEntire is also from Atoka or Stringtown, a very small town outside of there, and she has opened a restaurant in town. I think it is her sister who runs it. Anyway. Atlas LOVES to eat there. He says they have the best banana bread he has ever eaten ( it is pretty good ). This time around they had moved her chair from the Voice into the front room....

I will be honest with you, he had no idea what The Voice was and we had to explain it to him, but he felt he needed his picture taken in it. 

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The next day we went back to the museum, because they were having a printing class for kids, that  correlated with the Samurai exhibit. They taught the kids to take pictures, outline them onto a styrofoam  art plate, then paint and print the picture off onto a sheet of paper. My husband and I also joined in with Atlas, and honestly, tracing that picture on the foam plate was much harder than I imagined it would be. There was a fine line between not pressing hard enough and pressing too hard and tearing the plate.

Atlas picked a stylized picture of The Great Wave, but he struggled with getting all the lines pressed deep enough

He is a lucky kid and most things come easy to him...this wasn't.

Here he is covering his tracing with blue paint

He was scared to press and move his hand around on the paper so his printing was not the best. As you can tell by the look on his face, he was not happy with his outcome.

I told him that it was his first time, and that he wasn't here to perfect the process but to learn the technique, and to go home and practice to perfect it. 

This dragon was my masterpiece, if that is what you want to call it. I tried to add some yellow to the clouds that surrounded the dragon. That didn't work haha

My husband decided to show off, not by his art work obviously but by the fact that he actually knows Japanese and could write Shalom.

It was fun, and we had a great time learning something together. We honestly love being members at the museum and doing activities there. Well worth our time and our money.

See y'all next week hopefully. Drop your link so I can come visit!