I think most who read this blog know that my sister, Tessa, and I have a goal to visit all 50 states together. So, we had planned on making Oklahoma and Kansas numbers 9 and 10 by visiting the Pioneer Woman, Ree Drummond's, new Mercantile store in Pawhuska, OK. You may be familiar with her as she started out with just a blog (which is how we started following her), then wrote a couple cookbooks, landed a Food Network cooking show and now this store/restaurant that just recently opened a few weeks prior to our arrival. Brynn had watched her cooking show with me several times and knew who she is as well.
We were set to fly out of Fargo last Friday. The weather was blustering and kind of nasty here. We had a layover in Minneapolis and were going to fly into Wichita, eat dinner there after we landed and check Kansas off our list. We thought if we could at least get out of Fargo, we'd be smooth sailing, as the yucky weather wasn't supposed to stretch that far East and South. However due to high winds in Minneapolis, we were not able to land and had to hang out in the air for as long as we could (about 15 minutes), as we only had so much fuel to stay for that amount of time. So, we headed back to Fargo and wondered if our trip was over before it had even really got started. By the time we got back, we realized our flight to Wichita had already been cancelled. We refueled in Fargo and in the meantime Tessa was able to re-book us into Tulsa that night. So, we headed back to Minneapolis and made it into Tulsa instead. We were supposed to stay both nights with one of Chad's (Tessa's husband) relatives in a nearby city to Pawhuska, but with getting in so late, we ended up renting a mote room.
We headed out toward Pawhuska right away in the morning, ready to brave the anticipated wait into the restaurant. Since the store/restaurant is still so new, we had been hearing/reading that there was an average of a two-hour wait to just get into either the store or restaurant. It was a chilly wait with temps in the 40s for over two hours, but we visited with the other people in line and decided what we were going to eat for lunch once we did make it inside. Ree has four children, often featured on the blog and on her cooking show, so it was fun for us to see them outside while we were waiting.
At various times during our wait, employees would come out with prizes and do trivia questions.
This is us with Ree's second youngest and our prizes we won for traveling the farthest to come to the Mercantile!
The town of Pawhuska is very small and there is not much else going on, so the Mercantile store seems to be a big deal for the town. There were some other neat shops and stores across the street from where we were waiting, but we ended up not having time to visit those.
So close! This was at the very end of our wait.
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| Photo credit: Tessa |
The building that they had purchased and renovated for the store/restaurant was pretty old and used to be owned by the National Biscuit Company, now Nabisco (I think I have that correct)..
My beautiful sister and traveling partner!
The dishes on the menu were ones that Ree had featured on her blog, cookbooks and cooking show. Tessa has made several of the recipes, so we wanted to try as many different things as we could.
Everything was so delicious.
Tessa has made this chocolate sheet cake before which they served warm in the restaurant with a side of what we thought looked to be vanilla bean ice cream. It was so good. We were horribly stuffed when we were done!
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| Photo credit: Tessa |
The restaurant, deli and store are downstairs and then there is a bakery upstairs. There is a lot of nice sitting room upstairs.
I bought some candy for the girls up here.
We weren't sure if Ree was actually going to be at the store when we were there, but we were hoping it was a good chance given how new it all was. Luckily she was there all day meeting people and signing things. I had bought a platter that I had her sign the bottom of and a book for the girls which she signed as well. Of course she was super nice.
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| Photo credit: Tessa |
These are inside the store area downstairs...
Ree was selling some of her prints as she is a pretty avid photographer.
Us with our loot! We were starting to get concerned how we were going to be able to fly back home with everything.
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| Photo credit: Tessa |
I love these nighttime shots that Tessa took. We finished up I think it was about 5:00 and were going to head back to Kay and Gary's where we were to be staying. They offered to take us out for Mexican which was only a bit of a hard sell to us since had eaten so much at lunch, but the Mexican restaurant they took us to was fantastic. We just relaxed at their house for the evening and visited. They were so much fun; I'm glad it worked out for us to stay with them.
Since we ended up flying into Tulsa on Friday, and not Wichita, we still had to come up with something to do to make Kansas count. :-) We had made the 'rule' that we have to actually do something in a state to include it in the states visited; something other than just driving through or flying into that airport. We got up just after 6:00 AM on Sunday morning to drive to the airport so that we could have enough time to stop somewhere.
We stopped quickly crossing the Kansas/Oklahoma border and took the last two pics here with Tessa's auto timer on her cell phone. Poor thing was running to get into the picture until we finally wised up and moved a bit closer.
We had discussed stopping for breakfast somewhere or finding a church service to attend and we ended up doing the latter. It worked out quite well and we made it to the airport on time. Thankfully out trip home was uneventful, especially so compared to our travels out to Oklahoma.
Even thought it was short, it was a great trip and, as usual, we had an excellent time. I'm already looking forward to planning (or having Tessa plan, I should say, as she always does a great job of that!) our next adventure!
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