Texas to Tennessee

Outlaw

We awoke in Lubbock and started off toward Arkansas. This was a driving day so we didn’t expect anything too interesting to happen – until I got stopped by a Texas patrol car… Ok, so I was going a little fast. The speed limit was 75 and the road was a flat, straight line. This was the first time I’ve had a police officer tell me to step out of the car. I guess you shouldn’t mess with Texas after all. Either way after a nice long conversation with the officer, he let us go. That’s right, I’ve now talked my way out of not one, but TWO tickets on this trip.

Dallas/Fort Worth

Texarkana?...Arkadelphia? Really?

On the way to Arkansas we passed through Texarkana. It’s a pretty interesting town considering it’s in both Texas and Arkansas. We didn’t stop, but I looked up some facts about it on Wikipedia and that was enough for the both of us.

We finally made it to Little Rock, Arkansas to find it was a cool 100+°. And it was going to be 90° at midnight. Wonderful. We set up camp quickly and headed to the nearest Walmart. Interestingly enough, the one we found was the biggest one I’d ever seen; way bigger than the one we went to in Texas. Sorry Texas. Anyway, we got a small fan figuring it’d help a little. It helped a little, alright. Before we went to sleep we decided to light a fire; not for the heat I might add. I was reveling in the best fire I had made yet and along came the dude in the KOA golf cart. He stopped by to inform us that there was a fire ban and we had to put the fire out immediately. That’s ok. We didn’t need the heat and the wood was cheap anyway. Needless to say we went to sleep pretty early last night.

This morning we woke up about as sweaty as we’d expected. We took care of that and went to the Bill Clinton Presidential Library, but not before having some surprisingly good bagel sandwiches at a nearby café. So I had suggested we go to the presidential library as I thought it’d be pretty interesting. More so, I had by chance to geek out in Roswell so, being an English teacher, I figured a library would be right up Jaimie’s alley. It only cost $7 to get in and it was quite worth it. I plan on visiting some of the other presidential libraries when I get a chance. 

We spent a solid few hours watching videos and looking at correspondence between the President and such dignitaries as the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Tony Danza. It was really cool to see letters hand-written by the first two. Tony Danza’s looked like it was a letter to George Lucas written by a 12-year-old.

We left behind sweaty Arkansas and headed in the direction of Tennessee. I say this, and not ‘went to Tennessee’ because for some reason it felt like it took us FOREVER to get to where we’re staying tonight. 

Beale Street

On the way to our camp we stopped in Memphis. Being a musician, it was a must. We went straight to the legendary Beale Street. It was wonderful and I wish we could’ve stayed there longer. Actually it seems like it really comes to life at night, considering there were a few bars that had walk-up windows at which you could buy drinks. We went to Dyer’s, a burger joint that claims it’s been cooking it’s food in the same oil for 100 years. Whatever, it was delicious. Dessert was a deep-fried Twinkie, complete with powdered sugar and strawberry syrup. I didn’t care that we had a 5 hour drive ahead of us. That needed to happen.

Deep Fried Twinkie

It wasn’t really that long of a drive, and we got here in the amount of time we were supposed to, but it felt like we had been driving for days. Jaimie and I could probably stand to work on our conversation skills, too. It was a quiet and pretty uneventful ride. We made it to our camp and set up in the dark. We have a fire going and we finally have decently working wifi. The only setback was when we traveled into “town” the only thing open was a Taco Bell. Not a big deal. I’m used to eating tacos in my car. Oh well, it’s off to bed to sleep to the sound of frogs and crickets. We need to get our rest; tomorrow we Zorb.