You Never Know 'til You Go

 This is a Mitch Davis original saying: "You never know 'til you go". I use this often in my everyday living the retirement life but it applies to any place you may be in life. This post can be considered a follow up of last week's post about taking risks. Whenever my wife and I see a "fork in the road", I try to apply my saying to it. If I see a place to visit or dine in a local television show "Discover Oklahoma", I add it to a "to do" list in my phone in case I'm ever in that area. My theory of "You never know 'til you go" applies to about anything. New dining option- it could be great or it could be awful but "you never know 'til you go". New museum or retail establishment- could be awesome or it could be a flop but "you never know 'til you go". Just take a chance on doing new things, what is the worst that could happen other than you wasted a little money or time. Last weekend we visited the Seminole Nation Museum in Wewoka, OK (on my list from the show). It was about an hour and a half drive from Oklahoma City and we took the chance that it would be worth it. It was a smaller museum than I had envisioned but it had a lot of interesting information about the Seminole Nation and their removal from Florida and other states to the Indian Territory of Oklahoma. There was info on a whipping tree and an execution tree that stood in front of the courthouse where tribal police meted out punishment according to the criminal offense. The whipping tree still stands today in front of the courthouse just down the street from the museum. Interesting stuff!

On the way out to Wewoka, my wife and genealogist in our family, mentioned I have relatives buried in Wewoka. We decided to find the cemetery because "you never know 'til you go".  After the museum visit we headed out and found the old cemetery on a dirt road outside of town. Unfortunately it was grown up and you could only see a few headstones. We both walked around the small cemetery and found headstones from my great grandmother and great great grandfather. My wife knew from her research that my great great grandmother was buried there also. I walked all over that place kicking away grass and branches trying to find her resting place. My wife stepped off the paces from great grandmother's headstone to the next headstone and then took the same amount of paces in the other directions and Bingo! she finds the headstone of my great great grandmother under the grass . Very cool! Now we are a little more hooked on our family history and plan on visiting a few more cemeteries in the future. 

I use my saying at a lot of places. We love to go to thrift stores. Sometimes, when we are debating on visiting a thrift store, I will voice "you never know 'til you go" because you never know what treasures await on those shelves. So, use my saying whenever you are debating doing something because more often than not you will come back from the activity saying "that was fun" or "that was unexpectedly good" or something similar. You can use the saying for anything. Thinking about meeting your new neighbor, trying a new church, trying a new restaurant, hiking a new trail, visiting a new place, reading a book from a different author and anything else you can think of. Go ahead, give it a try and you may be surprised at how it turns out.