Today was a long day of traveling. It was made even longer by the fact that we
could only get radio for Country or Mexican stations along the way…nothing
against them, but it wasn’t happening.
Today also officially marked the end of the Texas portion of our
vacation and the beginning of the Arkansas portion. Due to the fact that the GPS didn’t want to
go along the roads that we wanted to go, I had to go all old-school and pull
out the paper map. My wife looked at
me like I had lost my mind…these young ‘uns nowadays!
We took a route that brought us through College
Station. We toured around town for a
little bit, basking in nostalgia and gaping at the more recent
construction. It’s amazing how much
things have changed in the last seven years.
For old times sake, we thought we’d have lunch at one of our favorite
places from back in the day, but when we started to think about it, we realized
that our “old” selves can’t eat that crap anymore. So, we settled on Schlotzky’s.
Our first stop in Arkansas was the site of our one-year
anniversary, Petit Jean State Park. The
park is nestled in a picturesque forest just west of Little Rock, so we had a
beautiful drive down I-30, cutting through tree-lined tunnels of highway on our
way. Of course, all I saw of this was a
green blur, because Mario Andretti (a.k.a. my wife) was racing down the road
trying to beat the sunset. She didn’t
even slow down as we got closer to the park, and the roads got narrower and
single-laned. There were some curves
that I could literally feel the car starting to drift across the pavement as
the wheels on my side left solid ground.
But due to my wife's manic obsession with stopping to get gas every
time we used a quarter of a tank, and my thimble bladder screaming to be taken
seriously and not to be ignored, we didn’t make it to the park until after
dark.
Imagine our surprise when we found out the cabin we had
procured, while nice, didn’t have a kitchen in it. This might not seem like a big deal, except
for the fact that we had loaded up with things that we could cook…on the
stove…in a pan. This ought to be
interesting…I’ll keep you posted as this develops.
