Tuesday Afternoon Update

Dan: It’s 3 p.m. mountain time and we’re in the San Isabel National Forest, on the way to Leadville, Colorado. It’s hard to judge times and distances when driving through the mountains, so it seems we may be stopping a little early for the night. But the welcome center brochure made Leadville sound like fun, so we’re looking forward to spending some extra time exploring the town. We’ll give our review of the town in our next blog entry. Since my last entry on Sunday at the Nashville McDonald’s, we drove through Memphis and saw what looked like a really fun block party on Beale Street. The weather was gorgeous and we’d have stopped if we had a free afternoon, but we were only interested in drive-by sightseeing, so we drove by and then we crossed the Mighty Mississippi. We were surprised that eastern Arkansas was so boggy, with cypress trees and many marshes. Then we turned north at Little Rock and started seeing more hills as we passed the Ozark National Forest. Morey suggested in a reply to one of our posts that we should check out the Bill Clinton Library. Frankly, Steven, it didn’t even occur to us! We spent the night in Van Buren Arkansas, right outside Fort Smith, in a Best Western that really impressed us. The next morning we ran 4 miles (Alan ran, I ran/walked), and we were on the road again by 7 a.m. We decided we should start sightseeing a little more since we were making such good time. On the way to Oklahoma City we stopped at the National Shrine of the Infant Jesus of Prague (who knew?), and the St. George’s Monastery a little farther down the road, as well as the National Route 66 Museum. Oh, by the way, we picked up a hitchhiker as well --- you probably saw him in some of the photos that Alan posted. He seemed to have amnesia, couldn’t remember his name. He said he was a war criminal and that we should call him Dick. We told him he was being too hard on himself and we’d call him Curly instead. At Amarillo we turned north toward Colorado. Grace had suggested we stop at The Big Texan restaurant while we were there; and we did pass it, but we weren’t hungry and felt like moving on. We ended up in Dumas, TX mainly because the name intrigued us and we were curious about how the locals pronounced their town name. We stayed in the Dumas Days Inn, which was our best hotel yet. We slept late and got on the road this morning around 8:30. What a scenic day this has been!  Immense flat Texas ranches with everything BIG, then a stunning corner of New Mexico as we drove into Colorado. Along the way we’ve seen tumbleweed, pronghorn antelope, buffalo, mule deer, the Sante Fe Trail, 14,000 foot snowcapped peaks, white water kayakers, and twisting mountain roads. Now it’s time to explore Leadville.