Thanks to Matt’s and Caryn’s suggestion, we stopped at Mud Island today, where there is a scale model of the Mississippi river that you can walk along (and in!).
It’s about half a mile long, and the water gets to about a foot deep or so in places. It is one of our favorite places we’ve visited thus far. At the very end is a big wading pool, and a bigger one representing the Gulf of Mexico, in which you can rent paddle boats, though we didn’t.
We re-crossed the Mighty Mississipp’ today,
and are (therefore) back in the east. Only this time, we did it much further south, on I-40 at the border between Arkansas and Tennessee.
Last night we stayed with Matt and Caryn and their family. Matt and Caryn lived in Belmont eleven years ago, where we attended the same church. At the time, we both had children one year old, about the only two kids in the church. They left for Arkansas about eleven years ago, where Caryn’s family is from. We’ve had occasional letters from them in the intervening years, and as with most of our friends, they are better correspondents than we.
In spite of our lack of communication, when Susan emailed and told them we’d be driving through Arkansas, they opened their hearts and home to us, and hosted us for dinner and breakfast, and shared with us their warm, cozy home for the night. The epitome of hospitality. Thank you!
Their boys are right around the same age as our kids, and they seemed to get along right away. Their two dogs were also a hit with our kids. In addition to enjoying a small part of their land, we got to meet a rat snake that lives under the workshop, and their rabbit, Bun-Bun. And they introduced us to the game Spore — not sure if that’s a good thing or not 🙂
Clara has had a cough for essentially our entire trip. At the beginning, it seemed like the tail end of the cold she had had. And at times, it seemed to be getting better. But we finally had to admit that it wasn’t really clearing up, so we went to a clinic in downtown Conway, where in under an hour Clara had been seen by a clinician and gotten the three prescriptions he had prescribed. Hopefully, this will help.
The ice cream cone sign, visible from the interstate, drew us in.
There was also a fresh food market inside, with produce and everything. Very nice! Who would have dreamed that this placid exterior hid a fast food restaurant inside?
Well, there we were, and it wasn’t McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Arby’s, Hardees, etc. It was Braum’s. So we ate.
Headed to Conway, Arkansas today. over the Ozark mountains. I-40 in this part of Oklahoma is more rolling (although this picture doesn’t show it well) and feels more New England-like.
for so long it’s not true.
Here we are at the Days Inn in Shawnee, Oklahoma for the night. Faithful readers will know that we often stay at Comfort Inn, but there was none here, so we had to pick an alternative.
We picked a restaurant for dinner from TomTom, hoping to find a local steak house (seemed appropriate), or at least one that wasn’t a familiar chain (Texas Road House is pretty common out here), and we ended up at the Santa Fe Cattle Company which turns out to be a chain, but a more regional one. It was very like Texas Road House, though, with the whole peanut thing, the same kind of rolls, etc. Dinner was pretty good, even if two of the kids’ dinners were chicken fingers and grilled cheese.
We’ve made it into Oklahoma, where we stopped at the first exit and had a picnic lunch. The visitor center was very nice and modern, with clean restrooms. The weather had cleared up almost completely, so the picnic was very enjoyable. The kids played in the grass
and even got to feed some horses over the fence in the back, before taking a picture by the sign.
