Driving (to) Miss Daisy

November 8, 2023 – Day 41

Today we decided to drive! We’ve never done that before.

The good news is that today we were able to clean the windshield. (kidding) It was going to be a short day. Our drive was just 260 miles.

During the day Susan checked the weather back home. We were very happy to be not home right now. Definitely pleased that we wouldn’t be driving in what was coming the next day.

Partway through today’s drive we noticed that we had left the flat, dry part of the Southwest. We now had rolling hills and trees with “normal” fall colors. And the first clouds we’d seen in weeks! We had seen some beautiful yellow trees near Lincoln, NM. But they were on weird-to-us New Mexico trees not trees like we have in New England.

We went through the little town of Dierks, Arkansas, pop. 916.

Curiously, Apple ids this as Dierks Ar-La-Tex.

The Ark-La-Tex (a portmanteau of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas; also stylized as Arklatex or ArkLaTex) is a socio-economic tri-state region where the Southern U.S. states of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas join together. The region contains portions of Northwest Louisiana, Northeast Texas, and South Arkansas as well as the extreme southeastern tip of Oklahoma, in McCurtain County (part of Choctaw Country), partly centered upon the Red River, which flows along the Texas–Oklahoma state line into Southwestern Arkansas and Northwest Louisiana.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ark-La-Tex

We pulled into the visitor center at Daisy State Park in Kirby Arkansas. Paul went in to get registered and was back very quickly to get Susan. You see, the ranger said “I wouldn’t put that big rig on site 89.” She told us that people have damaged their rigs when they got stuck there because it slopes so much. And if we made it, we would still need more blocks/wood than we had on board. We took her advice and passed on site 89. The ranger helped us choose a sweet site that had water views! In what turned out to be a wise decision, we unhooked the Jeep before heading to our site. The road in was narrow, winding and hilly.

Once again, the site wasn’t very level. We used all our blocks and wood and made it work. The trip out the front door was a nightmare, Paul advised Susan to be careful when exiting because the bottom step was quite high off the ground. (susan here: I had a look and it was going to be quite a stretch getting down. Not sure if I actually left the coach, didn’t need to as we were settling in for the night.)

Daily: 260

Return Total: 1,480

Return Overall Miles/Day: 296

Return Driving Miles/Day: 185

Overall Total: 4,616

Total Driving Miles/Day: 330

mpg: 6.5