After lunch in Memphis I hit the road again towards Little Rock, which was, much to my surprise, really nice! The area down by the river was beautiful and the downtown area was in great shape. I need to come back with Heather and spend a little time here. I had a big burger at Big Orange just north of the downtown. Since I was by myself I sat at the bar and listened to the conversations around me. Then Madi called and we caught up a bit.
This surprising side of AR continued when I got to Fayetteville the next day for lunch. It was a very cute little college town with hills and roads that weren't all straight. I had lunch in a grilled cheese restaurant near campus with a pterodactyl hanging from the ceiling. I had the design your own grilled cheese and learned I may no longer be qualified for that kind of responsibility. Perhaps I was a little too ambitious.
Again, I need to bring Heather back here, but she is still a little put off with AR from a trip here years ago. This is when we met our neighbors to some land near Beaver Lake that we bought from my mother. I won't get into how we came to own, sight unseen, real estate in the toolies well past the sticks in a state where it's apparently legal for toddlers to marry (of course as long as they have their parent's permission). And maybe our experience was a little exaggerated because we were already a little freaked out by just how rural it was as we headed farther and farther into the country to see the land for the first (and only) time.
Our immediate neighbor to the north of the land was as nice as could be, but almost a caricature. As we were heading down new the dirt track that had been cut into the side of the hill (this is important soon) he was chugging up the steep hill on his quad to check the mail. Now, I'm no longer skinny, but he had more than a few pounds on me, and nothing to restrain them but some lime green gym shorts and matching flip flops. But as nice a guy as you could want to meet, describing this "little slice of heaven" enthusiastically.
We explained that we had originally tried to approach the land via the county road but it was blocked off. He looked down at the ground apologetically and said "Oh, so you've met the colonel". While we had been trying to figure out why the only road (we knew of) to the land was blocked off and how to turn around we had been greeted by a lovely fellow emerging from his doublewide with a rifle, who advised us to "git off his proppity". After our "Wrong Turn" we scooted back out of the holler and found the new cut down into the valley and our much more charming neighbor to the north. "I'm not saying I'd like to build a summer home here, but the trees are actually quite lovely."
After Fayetteville, I kept going through Bentonville, which we had been to before and I had gotten mixed together in my head with Fayetteville. It looked like a typical suburb with strip malls. It was nice enough, I'm sure in no small part from Walmart money, but with little else to really distinguish itself that I saw this time.
Having gone through Fayetteville I was committed to some pretty small roads for the last leg west to Wichita. It took a little longer than planned and I finally rolled in about dark. I picked up a pizza at Ziggy's on the way to my AirBnB, which I had mentally named the she-shed, because, well, that's a funny term, and it had been a very long drive.
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