We hit the State Fair last night, Okie Tourist style, with stroller and bags and all the things it seems to take to make a family outing complete.

We tried to do it on the cheap, although we spent $21 on corndogs, lemonade and chicken-on-a-stick to feed our family of 5. Not bad. Of course, some of our people are still very small. Your family might require more than a $3 corn dog for dinner. Alternately, your family might be more vocal about their demands for a more filling meal. Ours are still pretty distractable.

We were at the fair for about five hours, and we probably didn't do a third of all we would have liked to. We're going back on Wednesday (our oldest two kids are performing at the bandshell) and so we have plans to hit a few more things then.

Here's what we did, what we didn't do, and what we're planning to do.

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We just got back from the state fair and I am ready to write!

But first, we drew the names of the State Fair contest winners. Three lucky Okie Tourist readers will get four tickets each to go and enjoy the state fair themselves! One winner came from okietourist.com; the other two came from our Facebook page. All three shared what they liked best about the fair.

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Hey! The Oklahoma State Fair starts tomorrow, and The Okie Tourist is your connection for free tickets! We're giving away three 4-packs of tickets! The drawing will be held on Friday, Sept. 18 - so you have plenty to time to enjoy the fair.

To enter, just leave a comment on this post, answering this question.

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We just figured out who is the lucky winner of four free Frontier City tickets!

This being our first drawing, we wanted it to be as fair as possible.

We went through each post and numbered each comment in the order it was received. Then we weeded out the relatives' comments and any doubles on one post. We got 49 eligible comments!

Then we went to an online number generator and asked it to pick a random number between 1 and 49.

The number selected was 17.

And that lucky winner is...

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I have to get this out in the open first. This review may be slightly biased because I seriously love Frontier City.

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How 'bout some free tickets to Frontier City?

We're going on Saturday and then reviewing it, but here's your chance to check it out for yourself!

All you have to do is comment on any of the reviews or posts on The Okie Tourist. On Sept. 12, we'll draw one name from all commenters and send that lucky person four free tickets to Frontier City! You can comment as many times as you like, but only one comment per post will be counted. So you can comment on each post and get several entries, but if you comment several times on one post, you'll only get one entry.

Clear as mud, right?

Regardless...enter now! We'll announce the winner on Sept. 12!

I have to admit - I was a little worried before our visit to White Water Bay this weekend.

I did my regular online search beforehand, and the reviews I saw didn't shine a good light on the place. I read about broken rides, awful lines, smelly astroturf and rude staff.

But we gathered up the sunblock anyway, and went to see for ourselves. And we didn't see any of those things. Not even one.

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It's Christmas in August all this weekend as Disney's Christmas Carol Train Tour makes a stop in downtown Oklahoma City.

So, the five of us, along with my mom, dragged out of bed this morning while it was still dark and left the house by 6 p.m. We were on a mission - a mission to get to the media's sneak peek of the Christmas Carol Train Tour with time to spare. The event kicked off at 7:30 a.m., and I didn't want to miss a moment.

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We celebrated a birthday on Sunday by meeting family for dinner. We didn't want anyone to have to travel three hours for a birthday meal, so we picked a location that was centrally located to all three travel parties. The winner? Seiling, Oklahoma...population 875, according to Wikipedia.

Now I don't know about you, but in my experience towns with only eight hundred and seventy-five people aren't the best travel destination. But a visit to the Seiling Chamber of Commerce website proved there were four restaurants in town...a good start for any get together. Our selections were Heath's Steakhouse, My Way Café, Subway, and Willy's Café.

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My family visited Lake Optima in March 2009. We didn't plan the trip; instead, we went to see relatives in the Texas Panhandle, and while there, we hit geocaching.com and a couple of letterboxing sites to see what we could do for fun up there.

There were a couple in Texas, but the biggest clump of geocaches was located north, in Lake Optima. I was intrigued, since I'd never heard of Lake Optima. My brother-in-law said that it was a failed lake, and had never reached capacity. Sounded interesting, so the next day we packed a lunch, four adults and seven children into two vehicles and headed up the highway.

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So, I like traveling around Oklahoma. I like it so much that I thought I'd write about it.

A couple of months ago, my family went to Lake Optima, which, in my opinion, was an incredible adventure. Came back home and looked it up, but I couldn't find much. That's when I decided to get more information about interesting places in Oklahoma out to the public - including the places the normal travel guides don't talk about.

I'm planning on going around to different areas all over the state and review them for you. Me (Regina, that is) and Ben (that's the man of the place) and our three kids are already going places, so why not share what we find out? We'll go to museums, lakes, events and other attractions, then let you know how it went. We'll also fill you in on good letterboxes and geocaches in these areas, if you're into that. We'll tell you how it really is.

That's Okie Tourist. Hope you enjoy it.