- 1. Arcadia and the Route 66 strip (about 30 minutes)
- 2. Turner Falls (about 1 hour 15 minutes)
- 3. Chickasaw National Recreation Area (about 1 hour 30 minutes)
- 4. Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge (about 1 hour 30 minutes)
- 5. Tulsa (about 1 hour 45 minutes)
- 6. Great Salt Plains (about 2 hours)
- 7. Bartlesville (about 2 hours 15 minutes)
- 8. Wichita, Kansas (about 2 hours 45 minutes)
- 9. Dallas and Fort Worth (about 3 hours 15 minutes)
- 10. Beavers Bend and Broken Bow (about 4 hours)
- 11. Eureka Springs, Arkansas (about 4 hours 30 minutes)
- 12. Palo Duro Canyon (about 4 hours 30 minutes)
- Getting out of Oklahoma City without a car
- Cheap weekend getaways from Oklahoma City by car
- Last-minute weekend getaways from Oklahoma City
Oklahoma City sits within a comfortable drive of more variety than most people give it credit for, and the twelve below are ordered by how long it takes to get there. Drive times are for clear roads, so add to them for a Friday evening start.
1. Arcadia and the Route 66 strip (about 30 minutes)
The Round Barn and Pops 66, a filling station with a sixty-six-foot soda bottle outside and several hundred sodas inside. Thin as a day out on its own, perfect as the first stop of a longer drive.
2. Turner Falls (about 1 hour 15 minutes)
A seventy-seven-foot waterfall into a natural swimming hole in the Arbuckle Mountains, which are among the oldest exposed mountains in North America. Busy in July, empty in October.
3. Chickasaw National Recreation Area (about 1 hour 30 minutes)
Mineral and freshwater springs, a lake and a set of 1930s stone waterworks built by the Civilian Conservation Corps. Small for a federal site and better for it.
4. Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge (about 1 hour 30 minutes)
Free-ranging bison, longhorn and elk on granite hills that rise straight out of the prairie. Mount Scott has a road to the top and the view explains the drive.
5. Tulsa (about 1 hour 45 minutes)
An art deco city centre funded by oil money, the Philbrook and Gilcrease museums, and Greenwood Rising, which tells the story of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in the district where it happened.
6. Great Salt Plains (about 2 hours)
A flat white salt flat where you can dig for hourglass selenite crystals, which occur in this form almost nowhere else. Digging season runs from spring into autumn.
7. Bartlesville (about 2 hours 15 minutes)
Price Tower is the only skyscraper Frank Lloyd Wright ever built, and Woolaroc, a ranch and museum with a bison herd, is twenty minutes further on.
8. Wichita, Kansas (about 2 hours 45 minutes)
Old Cowtown Museum, a strong art museum, and the Keeper of the Plains sculpture where the two rivers meet, lit by fire bowls most evenings.
9. Dallas and Fort Worth (about 3 hours 15 minutes)
Two very different cities an hour apart: Dallas for the museums and the Sixth Floor, Fort Worth for the Stockyards and the Kimbell. Pick one as a base.
10. Beavers Bend and Broken Bow (about 4 hours)
Pine forest, a clear cold river and a lake, in a corner of Oklahoma that looks nothing like the rest of it. Cabins book out months ahead for autumn.
11. Eureka Springs, Arkansas (about 4 hours 30 minutes)
A Victorian spa town built into a hillside, with no two streets on the same level and a historic district on the National Register in its entirety.
12. Palo Duro Canyon (about 4 hours 30 minutes)
The second largest canyon in the United States, eight hundred feet deep and almost entirely unvisited compared with the first. Camp at the bottom if you can get a site.
Getting out of Oklahoma City without a car
One useful line and not much else. Amtrak’s Heartland Flyer runs daily to Fort Worth, leaving Oklahoma City in the morning and coming back in the evening, with stops at Norman, Purcell, Pauls Valley, Ardmore and Gainesville. At Fort Worth it connects onward towards Dallas, Chicago and San Antonio. Everything else on this list needs a car.
Cheap weekend getaways from Oklahoma City by car
- Wichita Mountains: a national wildlife refuge with no entrance fee
- Great Salt Plains: free to dig, you just need a bucket and water
- Chickasaw: a national recreation area, free to enter
- Arcadia: a half-day on Route 66 for the price of the petrol
Last-minute weekend getaways from Oklahoma City
- Wichita Mountains, no booking and no fee
- Turner Falls, outside the July peak
- Tulsa, under two hours with a real hotel supply
- Wichita, Kansas, which rarely sells out
If you are deciding on the day, work backwards from the drive rather than the destination: anything under two hours leaves you a genuine Saturday, and anything past four is really a three-day trip wearing a weekend label.
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Written by
John Morrison is the founder and lead travel writer at Packzup. Over the past decade he has explored destinations across Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Oceania — always self-funded, never on a press trip.
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