Yogi Berra said “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” He must have watched me try to navigate strange streets in a strange car. We have specific roles as we motor across America.  I drive and Lydia navigates. She is quite adept at map reading and sign recognition. I’m not. I’m a ‘big-picture’ observer and so I generally see the place we are supposed to go, but miss the sign pointing our way. I tend to turn left when Lyd says right and try to turn too soon at freeway entrances. We make a lot of “u-turns”. We get pissed off. Eventually we get our groove and settle in to a workable rhythm. It just takes a bit. We rarely have others travel with us. They would not do it twice.

We wrestled all our luggage to the street door of the hotel and I retrieved the car from the carpark across the street. I circled once, then double parked in morning traffic while Lyd and the concierge heaved our bags aboard. Once more around the block (love one-way street grids) and we left Tennessee. I missed a street turn or two and took the wrong exit. We stopped for gas. The little store had zero varieties of bottled coffee, but 16 variations of pork rinds. She settled for bottled iced tea.

Arkansas is just as green as Tennessee, and we soon encountered fields of unharvested cotton. I cannot imagine spending even one day in the heat and humidity of Arkansas stooping to pick cotton. I managed to pick strawberries one summer in Oregon, but the air was cool and sweet, as were all the berries I ate.

After an hour the land became a hilly green, the road swerving back and forth up into the Ozarks. If I could tolerate the humidity, I might disappear into those hills and never come out, though there was no real sense of solitude along the highway. No house seemed more than a quarter mile from another.

The wind came up strongly as we approached what was considered an overlook. Tired, we stopped to take a breather and were assailed by a hot, wet breeze as we stepped out of the van to stretch. Putting our heads in a running clothes dryer would have been more refreshing.  We opted for the AC in the car.

About 3:00 in the afternoon we found our lodgings after mistaken wanderings. (We get to see a lot of backroads in our erring perambulations.) We were in Branson, Missouri. We had spotted a steak and catfish restaurant across the highway as we arrived and gave it a chance. The portions were huge, the green beans cooked with real bacon, the lemonade huge and refillable. The restaurant’s claim to fame was roll tossing. Sporadically, a server would appear from the kitchen with a large, metal bowl of dinner rolls. Yelling “Hot rolls! Who wants hot rolls?” The server then began throwing rolls to raised hands. A missed roll was not a problem, another was tossed. They were hot, light, and homey. We gathered the remainders of our huge dinners into to-go cartons and returned to our room.

Missouri was an interesting place.

 

Blessings

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