A Journey On

(Saturday Stories about traveling, part 4)

We wound up our short stay at the Buffalo River National Park and headed out to our next stop – Johnson’s Shut-ins State Park in Missouri.

Now you might wonder how we chose that place, and that is a great question, and the answer is that we wanted to avoid Memphis. I’ve never had a good experience driving through, in or around Memphis. So, I looked a the map and decided to go around Memphis to the north.

Once that decision was made, I had to find a camping spot for the night. I downloaded some apps that are supposed to help with that before we left home. One of them, RV Parky, along with the Rec.gov and the NPS apps are my favorites so far. The thing I like about RV Parky is you can go to map mode and it has symbols of RV parks and campgrounds in the area you are looking for something. You tap on the symbol and it pulls up a basic description of the park and its cost.

That is how I found Johnson’s Shut-ins State Park. It was also my choice because it was a park that had an open spot for that evening. Sometimes you take what you can get. I’ll come back to that in a moment.

But first I have to finish telling you about my celestial photography experiment. When we went to bed at Buffalo River, I had every intention of getting up and getting a picture. After all, I had spent $3 on that photography app. But when 3 AM rolled around a chill had settled over the air and I frankly didn’t want to go out into the cold dark night.

I argued back and forth with myself over it for quite a while until I came to the conclusion that my left brain wasn’t going to quit nagging my right brain until I did something about it. So, I crawled out of bed, grabbed my phone (that’s were the app is) and opened the back of the camper and stepped out into the night.

Well, it was dark alright. So dark I could barely see where I had left my tripod. The darkness wasn’t just because this was a dark sky area, but also because a heavy fog had settled over the valley. Not only could I not see my tripod, I couldn’t see any stars either.

Being that I was up, I took care of business, and headed back to the warmth of our bed for a couple of hours. A little later, after we got up, M cooked us up a delicious breakfast of eggs made by our very own Fern, Doris, Margret, and Lucy (Meg died this summer, RIP). Along with that we had M’s bread she made with fresh ground grains just before we left home. Wow is that good stuff. I’m off of Wonderbread forever. Of course, some tasty bacon rounded it out.

We packed and headed out. I know that some people don’t think our idea of a vacation is desirable. But hear me out. It is like a cruise only better. I call it a land cruise. You get to travel around and make port here and there and while you are at port you get to do some excursions.

But it is better than a sea cruise because I get to be the captain of the ship and M is my first mate. A Skipper and Gilligan sort of situation, without the shipwreck. We get to pick or make up our own excursions. There’s no chance of me getting sea sick – although M came close to getting car sick on some the Arkansas hills. Our sleeping quarters are as big as any ships sleeping area. And our food is better. And we have more excursions. And freedom.

Well anyway, we wound our way north through various towns and hamlets in northern Arkansas and southern Missouri. We stopped in Calico Rock, whose old downtown area you come to right after you cross a bridge over a river. It sits up on a bluff and that little downtown area is about as unlevel a downtown as you’ll find, but the shops, though few, are well done.

We visited a couple and then walked into an antique store. The proprietor was bent over, backside facing us, deeply involved in some dusting work. She didn’t hear us come in and when she stood and realized were shopping she gave us a surprised greeting. Nice lady. Very talkative.

It’s interesting what you can find out in a short amount of time if you listen to folks. They have been working on reviving that downtown area for about 15 years. I’m not sure who “they” are but she was definitely a member of the “they.” And doing a great job in my opinion.

There’s still a couple of empty buildings they need buyers for. Miss Sue wants too much for her two buildings – 175 and 200,000 respectively and according to antique lady she is asking too much, but she would be happy for her if she got that from them. But after all antique lady just bought the building next door to Miss Sue’s about a year ago for 75,000 and it is more square footage.

After we got the scoop on the downtown goings on, we saw a sign for a park and it seemed like that might be a good place to stop for lunch. It wasn’t much a park, but it did have a car show going on. About 15 classic cars lined up with their hoods up and their owners perched on lawn chairs among them.

We found an empty picnic table along the river and enjoyed our lunch before resuming our journey.