October 21 - 23, 2024 - Lafe and Faith's Odyssey

BBQ and a Baby Coon

The next morning, we went back to the coffee shop that I worked at on Friday to have breakfast with Sheryl, Faith’s grandma, before hitting the road south to our next destination. We got on I-29 and followed it along the Missouri River until we made it to Kansas City, KS and to my uncle’s abode. He and my cousin, Deagan, took us to dinner at Joe’s BBQ, one of the more famous joints in KC, and we indulged in a fantastic pastrami sandwich and some equally tasty fries. We went back to their house and spent the rest of the evening catching up and talking about all that we had done during the past summer. It was a work and school night for everyone, so we went to bed relatively early to get some sleep. The next morning, Deagan went off to school, Faith left to run errands, and Mike and I dialed in to work. It was a pretty uneventful day, be that for better or worse. Faith got stuff for us to make dinner, so “we” (all Faith’s doing) prepared a meal of pasta and caprese salad. It didn’t turn out quite like Faith had wanted, but the rest of us thought it was excellent. We spent the rest of the evening talking about nearly every topic we could come up with and finished the night off with a quick tour of their house and our house. I’ll give you one guess as to which tour was faster! It was a great time, and we thoroughly enjoyed getting to know Mike and Deagan better. We bid them goodnight and drifted off to sleep once again.

Alarms woke us up the next morning as we wanted to say goodbye before Deagan left for school. We barely made it in time to bid him farewell before we got our stuff packed up, said goodbye to Mike, and hit the road south. Today, we had an ambitious goal: one National Monument and a National Park. We drove south and made our first stop at George Washington Carver National Monument in southwestern Missouri. For being in pretty much the middle of nowhere, it has a very well done visitor center and some pretty grounds protecting the grounds around Carver’s childhood home. We spent a while poking through the various exhibits before purchasing a postcard and small peanut pin to commemorate our visit. Back on the highway, we soon entered Arkansas and the town of Bentonville. Just before we got there, we learned of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art located nearby that is free to the public. It proved too tempting, so we detoured to the museum and spent a couple hours poking around the myriad art pieces and exhibits. There was a lot of very beautiful pieces and a lot of… not quite so pretty ones. We made our visit pretty quick so we could get moving towards our ultimate destination for the day: Hot Springs, AR, home to Hot Springs National Park. The rest of our drive was through the Ozark and Ouachita mountains, and we were fortunate enough to catch them in their colorful fall regalia. It was an extremely beautiful drive that dropped us straight into town with hardly a pause. We arrived in Hot Springs just as the sun was setting and had just missed seeing the bath houses that the park is known for. So, we spent the rest of the evening poking around the touristy areas along the park before heading up the mountain behind the bathhouses to make dinner. We made a dinner from cheese and chopped sweet potatoes in what was supposed to be something like latkes. It didn’t quite turn out like that, but it was still good and filling. While eating, we kept hearing ruffling of leaves a little ways from where we were. We figured it was probably just a deer, but once we swung our flashlights towards the source we realized that it was a young coon nosing around. He was a cute little guy, and we watched him for a while before settling in for the night. Unfortunately for us, the sign saying that the park closed at 10PM was, in fact, not lying: a park ranger swung around the corner, parked, and cheerfully informed us the park was closed and offered some alternatives for where we could sleep. It was a 10/10 law enforcement encounter. We didn’t intend to drive 20 minutes to a costly campground; instead, we found a spot along the road a few blocks away from the park and holed up for the night.