The Boston Globe featured an old school travel article about Oklahoma City…

"Even if Oklahoma City is not a top-of-mind destination, many of us came home convinced it deserves a place on most bucket lists."

At 9:30 on a Friday night, six girls and five adults pull up at the roadhouse, a 20-minute drive southwest of downtown. At the door, bouncers wave metal detectors, searching for weapons. Inside, a sign warns against underage drinking. “This is a place for making babies, not serving them,” say the neon letters. Nearby, the young women mostly wear Daisy Dukes; men favor sleeveless T-shirts to show off tattoos. Once the shock — we’ve taken our teen daughters to a roadhouse — wears off, the parents grow comfortable. By midnight, this dance floor will feel more risque than a Miley Cyrus video, but at mid-evening the place is only a quarter full, no one bothers us, and the scene is safely PG-13.

The owner lines the girls up in front of the mechanical bull, set in a roped-off area and surrounded by deep pads on the floor, and offers a few pointers. “It’s sort of like dancing, but instead of moving your hips from side to side, you move them forward and back when the bull bucks,” he says.

Each girl takes a turn, with the owner working the controls and keeping the rides fairly gentle. “Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)” plays in the background. Nearby on the dance floor, the twentysomething crowd begins line dancing. Three of the five parents go for a ride. Most sport goofy grins, and no one falls off.

As he powers down the bull, the owner calls over the DJ, who leads the girls to the stage. “All the way from Boston, Massachusetts, let’s give a big Oklahoma welcome to the champion riders from the Hillside Meadows equestrian team,” he shouts into the microphone. The dance floor erupts in cheers. By 10:30, we’re all back in the cars and safely en route to the hotel.

The city’s best dining choice requires some perseverance: Cattlemen’s Steakhouse doesn’t take reservations, and on weekends it can be an hour or two to get a table. Cattlemen’s is located west of downtown in Stockyards City, once home to the meatpacking plants that were the capital’s dominant employer. Even today, there are live cattle auctions here on Mondays and Tuesdays, and the neighborhood is filled with leather-goods stores.

Today horses are a luxury good, part of America’s vast recreational economy — but until fairly recently they were work animals that helped men and women run the ranches crucial to the Western economy. That history is celebrated at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum (405-478-2250; nationalcowboymuseum.org), 6 miles north of downtown Oklahoma City. One display illustrates the different chaps, boots, spurs, and saddles used by cowhands. Another catalogs 1,300 types of barbed wire, an innovation that reduced cattle’s ability to roam, making cowboys’ work far easier. There are exhibits devoted to the history of rodeos, cowboy movies, frontier cooking, and antique firearms. At the museum, I am surprised to learn that cowboys were prevalent well into the early 20th century. Large galleries display cowboy- and Indian-themed sculptures and paintings. Late one morning near the entrance, a group of Native Americans performs a ceremonial dance in front of The End of the Trail,a 17-foot-high plaster sculpture of an Indian rider on a horse

Downtown Oklahoma City’s primary dining-and-entertainment neighborhood is Bricktown, a roughly 10-block neighborhood east of the city center that features almost 50 bars and restaurants, a minor league ballpark, horse-and-carriage rides, and a canal offering water taxis and tours. Think Quincy Market, with a much higher bar-to-shopping ratio.

We choose Mickey Mantle’s Steakhouse, considered one of the city’s top restaurants. It’s decorated with memorabilia from the Oklahoma-born Yankee slugger — including his 1956 Triple Crown — and our large group samples steaks, fish, and various kids’ entrees. (The risotto wins particular raves.) But aside from the Yankees decor, the food is much like a Capital Grille, and we might as well have been in Chestnut Hill.

Oklahoma has its distinctive foods. One is the onion burger, which legend says was a creation of the Great Depression, when people added heaping piles of onion to ground beef to extend it. I try one at Bunny’s Onion Burgers, in a strip mall west of downtown, and it’s decidedly meh. The region also features taco and Tex-Mex places every few blocks; we try several, but nothing stands out.