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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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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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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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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