A New Wander: Last Installment

 

  This is the final post in a series. 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. 

 Last night, at the restaurant where we had dinner, the TV was silently playing the weather channel. It was all about some storms affecting New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia and North Carolina at that moment. But in between what appeared to be tediously repetitive reports that rain was falling and wind was blowing, they briefly showed a map of Oklahoma and Arkansas, all swathed in bright, scary colours, with the legend "Travel weather dangers." No idea what they were saying, but it looked ominous. 

 We had no TV in our room, because a storm the previous night had taken out the satellite dish for the hotel. So we never saw another local weather report. (Yes, I could have gotten one on my phone if I wasn't a Baby Boomer and was accustomed to such things. As it is, the idea never occurred to me.)

 This morning dawned bright and clear. Our first planned stop, about 30 minutes away, didn't open until 10AM, so we were in no rush. I walked over to a truck stop a quarter-mile up the street for some coffee, then later we decided to have breakfast at a place downtown called Big Cuppa. An excellent choice; a nice small-town coffee shop owned by a young couple who roast their own beans and bake their own pastries and basically do everything themselves. Then we went to a bank to get some cash (even paying the $4 ATM fee, because there's not a Chase within 40 miles of where I was, and nowhere along the route, and I was down to like $5); and then we headed out.

Petit Jean's grave

 Along the way, as we drove to the top of Petit Jean Mountain, we saw a sign for "Petit Jean Grave and Overlook." So what the hey, let's go see what that is. Turns out it's the grave of the woman for whom Petit Jean Mountain (and the Petit Jean River and Petit Jean Valley and a number of other places) is named. Her real name was Adrienne Something, but when her lover came to explore the area she disguised herself and came over as a cabin boy on his ship. According to the legend, the idiot didn't recognise her until she fell deathly ill and they discovered, then, that she wasn't a boy at all. Stop me if you've heard this one. Yada yada yada she died and they buried her up on top of this mountain for some reason.

 Anyway, a pretty place, with views across the Arkansas River. A little less smoke in the air today, but still the visibility is reduced. 

 A short distance down the road is the Museum of Automobiles. You can tell from the building and its expansive grounds that there's some money behind this collection. Some guy named Rockefeller, apparently, lives in the area, and he helped set the thing up and contributed several of the cars. The facility only has room to display about 50 vehicles at a time, but they do a pretty good job. I'm at the point in my car-museum-going that I pretty much skip over the Model Ts and Model As and '64 Mustangs and '57 Chevies; I've seen so many of them already, and I have places to go and things -- new things -- to see. 

 Well, okay, not new; we are talking antique cars here. But novel things.

 So I went through the museum looking mainly at cars I don't see often or ever. They display a number of makes that I've almost never heard of, like a Star station wagon and a Metz runabout, and models that I don't often encounter in museums, like the 1952 VW, the 1954 Chevy Bel Air or the De Soto Airflow. The cars are well-lit and, for the most part, positioned so that I can get some good pictures of the fronts and sides, but as is common with car museums, the back ends, facing away, are out of sight and can't be photographed in some cases. The only way to solve that problem is to place the cars where visitors can walk all the way around them, but that would mean fewer cars can be displayed. It's a trade-off.

 After the museum, the plan was to drive up the scenic route past Hardy Falls and the Petit Jean Valley overlook, then down to the Talihena Scenic Route in Oklahoma. At that point, we were going to head home. But there were no falls that we could see at Hardy Falls (and no place to pull over on a winding mountain road), and at the Petit Jean Valley overlook the weather was so threatening, with rain starting and lightning all around, that I decided not to get out of the car on the highest point in central Arkansas. I put the top up and we headed on down the road. (Plus, the view was mostly obscured by rain in the valley.) We stopped in Paris, Arkansas for lunch at a bar and grill -- the rain had eased enough that we could get from the car to the door without getting soaked -- and then I decided it was just time to head home. I plugged in a route, calculated that we could make Dallas today, and we went off to do that. We started another audio book, the second in the Junior Bender series. I think we should finish it around Austin or San Marcos tomorrow (unless Dallas has resolved the issues concerning rush hour on Central Expressway) (which I doubt).

A New Wander, Day 7: St Robert, Missouri, to Morillton, Arkansas

  This post is the sixth for this Wander. 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. 

 This morning's drive from St Robert, Missouri was exactly the kind of driving I love, the main reason I come on wandering trips like this. Good, well-maintained winding roads, not much traffic, a little up-and-down elevation, clear skies and cool-enough temperatures. The first few miles were a little tense for me, as the dashboard indicator said my engine coolant level was low. I just had the sensor for that replaced (because it would show me that message all the time without actually being the least bit low), so I kept an eye on the temperature guage, which didn't budge, and before I came to a place where I could pull over, the idiot light went out. If it happens again I'm going to have to have the sensor replaced again.

 We didn't have breakfast this morning; neither of us was hungry. I stopped for some coffee at a convenience store, then we headed on down through rural Missouri to the town of Hartsville, where we located the marker showing that a local spot (actually out in somebody's field a little northeast of the marker) was the center of the United States' population at the time of the 2020 census. (I assume that if they'd accurately counted all the minorities in Texas back then, the spot would be maybe 30 or 40 miles to the southwest, but hey, this spot's official and it's all really not worth discussing.)

 We continued listening to our audiobook, Crashed, and finished it just before we got to our hotel this evening. Not great literature by any means, but an entertaining whodunit. There are a total of eight books featuring the same "detective," a professional burglar with, of course, a heart of gold, so we've checked out the next in the series to listen to starting tomorrow.

Buffalo River Canyon in the Ozarks

 We cruised back into the Ozark Mountains, stopping first at Arkansas' "Grand Canyon." It's actually the Buffalo River canyon, about two thousand feet from the tops of the surrounding mountains to the mean water level. There seems to be a lot of smoke in the air; maybe from those Canadian wild fires? I haven't heard any more about it since it stopped affecting our national media centers in New York City and Washington DC. Makes me feel a part of the Great Ignored Center of the nation, places to be dismissed as insignificant flyover country. This is why the Radical Right fringe of morons is so ready to dismiss the national media. One of the reasons, anyway: their own gullibility combined with stupidity and ignorance helps, too, as they sit on their home computers "doing their own research."

 But I digress. 

 We continued south through the mountains to a dirt-road turnoff for Falling Waters Waterfall. (Yes, these hillbillies spend a lot of time thinking up names for things.) It's where a small creek drops about eight feet over a dramatic precipice into a pool that's deep enough to permit diving and swimming. Despite its remoteness, there were about a dozen people there. It looked like a very nice place to spend an afternoon, but of course we weren't interested in spending much time there. Just went to see it, & take a couple of pictures.

 Coming away from there, we had no internet signal. I'd picked out a route on my paper map, but unfortunately the area was right on the fold and the fold had torn, so I couldn't read the road numbers. We got back to a pavement and headed south, but that road eventually turned east and then north. At one point we passed a county line, and I could locate our position on the map from that. I continued going what was actually the wrong way (because, by then, it was the shortest way back to where we wanted to go) and we arrived in Morillton, Arkansas, where we're spending the night. There's a car museum here that I want to see. It doesn't open until 10AM, but we figured we could do our laundry in the morning while we waited for it to open. (Tuesday is the day I'd planned on doing laundry from the start of the trip, as I always pack enough for one week. Today is one week on the road.)

 We checked into the Morillton Motel and cranked up the AC. There's no TV in the room because, apparently, there was a hell of a storm here last night. We noticed big puddles of water and some trees down in the area. The restaurant we'd picked first for dinner, not far from the hotel, was closed, apparently because they've lost power. (The power poles along the road leading to the restaurant are being held up by the lines; they're leaning away from the road with big cracks a few feet above ground level.) 

 The hotel, for other reasons, is something of a dump. We had no towels; when they provided some, they proved to be of the lowest possible quality. There was no handle on the inside of the bathroom door; the toilet ran and ran unless you reset the handle; the keys didn't work and had to be re-done. But the beds were clean and comfortable, so that was the main thing. But you kind of expect more for the not inexpensive price they charge.

 While I was waiting for Roland to come out and go to dinner, I checked the weather for Tulsa. My plan was that we would get to Muskogee (or so) tomorrow night, then spend Wednesday and Thursday nights in Tulsa. But Wednesday's high is predicted to be 109, and Thursday's will be 104. We discussed this over dinner and have decided to cut our trip short. I believe we will get into Oklahoma tomorrow evening, probably to around Talequah, maybe even farther; then we're a day's drive from home. I may even be home in time to see the US play St Kitts & Nevis in the Gold Cup at 8:30 that evening. 

 Fingers crossed.

Click on "Newer Post" below for the next installment of this gripping story.