A New Wander, Day 3: Little Rock to Missouri

 This is part three of many. You really should read them in order. You'll find Part One here, and here's a link to the photo album for this trip.

 I found us a good place for breakfast in North Little Rock this morning. It was called BJ's Market Cafe, because it's in the Farmer's Market, a large complex of warehouses near railroad tracks and highways. It was also close to a branch of Chase Bank, which was my first destination of the day, so that was a point strongly in its favour. It was also the only place listed on Yelp's or TripAdvisor's top-ten list that wasn't a chain restaurant. 

 After breakfast (oatmeal, an homage to A Certain Person who has that most mornings when travelling) I plugged a route into Google Maps, then had to re-do it three times before I could get one that didn't take us down 15 miles of frontage road along Interstate 40, or along Interstate 40 itself. It's tedious, putting in meaningless intermediate stops along the roads I want, but it's the only way to get the program to take me down back roads when there's a freeway in the way. And then when we get near one of those useless intermediate points, I can cancel the stop and it should continue to the next. Sometimes I forget to cancel the stop, and end up turning down weird little roads and wondering why the Hell I'm going there.

says it all

 Our first stop after the bank was Toad Suck. Really just because of the name of the town. It's right on the Arkansas River, with its own lock and high bridge, but there's nothing at all to see there except the sign welcoming you to town. It's so Arkansas.

 Then we cruised up through the Ozarks. Hours of driving on well-maintained winding mountain roads with little traffic, top down, gorgeous weather, highs in the 80s. We stopped for lunch at Mountain View, a very tourist-oriented place. I parked on the street by the courthouse and was gratified by how many people stopped to look at the car and comment on it. (They didn't know it was mine; I was in the shade on the sidewalk some small distance away, enjoying the show. There was probably a Trump-like cloud of narcissism hanging about me, visible only to cats and witches.) Although I did notice that, last night in Little Rock, that son of a bitch with the red Nissan who parked too close to me at Club Taco scratched my car with his door. Roland said it was alright, because he'd put a nice big scratch in the red Nissan when trying to get back into my car. He had a hard time of it because he couldn't open the car door far enough (because of the red Nissan). Karma sucks, dude. 

 If I thought I could find that red car I'd go back to Little Rock and do some real damage to it. I'm thinking broken windows.

 There was a local crafts school on a corner in Mountain View. I went to check it out after lunch, hoping it'd be like the Kentucky state crafts operations I've seen. (Lunch, by the way, was unremarkable except for featuring a dessert of Ozark Mountain pie: coconut and chocolate. Sherry would have hated it, but I didn't.) Anyway, the Kentucky craft shops always have excellent work for sale. But no, this shop consisted of the kind of arts and crafts one sees in pop-up pavilions at the Strawberry Festival or the Taste of New Orleans: ticky-tack jewelry, cheap stained glass Christmas ornaments, some artless pottery and fabrics. Not really worth the block-and-a-half walk to get there.

 North of Mountain View, near a town called Allison, is an old one-lane suspension bridge, one of only two in the state. I'd been across the other, in northwestern Arkansas, a few years ago, and it had been kind of exciting. Roland was unimpressed in the extreme, though, so it was really anticlimactic. Still, glad I did it.

Rocky Falls

 Our main stop in the afternoon was at Rocky Falls, in Missouri. This is a very pretty place, but there were about 30 people there, which I hadn't expected, since it's so remote. Roland refused to walk the 80 yards down to see the falls so I went by myself, which made it less fun. But I took a few pictures and watched the kids and others climbing around on the rocks and swimming in the swimmin' hole and lounging on the pebble shore, and then wandered back to the car. We took the wrong road on leaving (no internet out there) and came to a dirt road after about three miles, and then the dirt road became a track and I said, No, I'll not be taking my pegasus down that trail, so we turned around and found the right road. 

 The only hotels we could locate were about 15 miles out of our planned route, so we had made a reservation in Farmington. It turned out to be a pretty good place: nicer than either of the hotels we'd stayed in earlier on this trip, insofar as it had carpet on the floors and the toilet didn't overflow. A little more expensive, though, but we're both rich old men and can afford it, however much we don't want to. 

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