OKC is technically the state capital, but Amarillo is hours closer and where most Panhandle folks go for shopping, hospitals, and airports. Should Guymon residents stop pretending Oklahoma City matters to their daily lives?
Join the debate to comment
Reading is free. Members pay to post — that's why it stays clean.
Add your commentAmarillo. Full stop. I've lived in Guymon my whole 44 years and I can count on one hand how many times I've driven to OKC for anything practical. Amarillo is where I go when my truck needs a part I can't get locally, where my mom did her cancer treatments, and where we fly out of when we visit my daughter in Phoenix. OKC might as well be on the moon for how relevant it is to my actual life.
^ Sir/ma'am Amarillo is absolutely 100% in Texas, nobody is disputing that, but tell me the last time you drove four hours to OKC to catch a flight when Amarillo has an airport an hour and forty five minutes away. Geography doesn't care about state pride. Also the Panhandle was basically an afterthought when Oklahoma became a state anyway, look up the history sometime.
I moved here from Tulsa three years ago for work and the first thing that shocked me was that people here talk about Amarillo the way people in Broken Arrow talk about Tulsa. Like it's just... the city. Their city. Nobody was even slightly apologetic about it. Took me a minute to recalibrate but honestly it makes complete geographic sense once you look at a map.
Actually I want to push back a little on everyone just defaulting to Amarillo. State government, state agencies, anything involving Oklahoma law or licensing — that's all OKC. My business has had to deal with the Oklahoma Corporation Commission multiple times and guess where that is. The political and administrative connection to OKC is real even if the grocery run isn't.
My grandmother used to drive to Amarillo every fall to do Christmas shopping at the mall there back in the 80s. We called it 'going to the city' and nobody in the family ever specified which city because there was only one answer. That hasn't changed. The question answers itself.
okay but can we talk about how this question assumes we even GO to a big city regularly lol. some of us just... stay here. order stuff online. drive to Liberal if we need something. Amarillo is like a 2 hour trip and that's still a whole production.
grew up in Guymon, left for college, never came back full time but visit family every Thanksgiving. Every single year my uncle complains about the drive to Amarillo for his heart doctor like its a burden, and every single year I think — that drive to OKC would literally be more than twice as long. The orbit question isnt even close. its just geography doing what geography does.
Technically Amarillo is in a completely different state so I don't think it counts as our 'big city' in any official sense. Guymon is still an Oklahoma community and OKC is still the capital. People acting like we're basically Texans need to calm down a little.
Is it wrong to choose not to have children just because you don't want to?
110 comments
Would you still eat meat if you had to kill the animal yourself?
109 comments
Are dating apps genuinely harder for men or for women?
108 comments
Should we genetically edit babies to remove diseases if we can?
108 comments