4th of July

For the fourth of July, we took an extra-long weekend to visit Baton Rouge and Metairie.

When David, an old friend of Bryan’s, visited us a couple of months ago we took him to the climbing gym here in Little Rock. He went home to Baton Rouge and looked up the climbing facilities in his area, and I think he’s been climbing every weekend since! When we visited David this month, he and his friend Denise took us to the gym in Lafayette.


On Saturday we went to an Independence Day lunch with family. Bryan’s little cousins, Blake and Peyton, were good hosts. As soon as we arrived, they went to brush their teeth, “because a pretty girl is here now.” They made very sure Mandy knew that their teeth were clean. She wasn’t terribly impressed with that, but she enjoyed their teeter totter before heading inside for a smoothie and to watch the History Channel.


We were glad to finally meet our niece, baby Emma. She’s at a hard age to photograph; she’s older than a blob but still too young to sit up by herself. We got a few decent shots but we’re looking forward to our next visit in October, when she’ll be sitting up unassisted and (hopefully) easier to photograph. I took Emma to the bookstore to pick out a book. This time I chose (a Sandra Boynton book) but it won’t be long before she has opinions on this sort of thing.


The real high point of the visit, for Mandy, was the fishing trip. Bryan’s dad organized a trip on a real fishing boat; they got her up at 3 am and drove to Empire. She had a wonderful time fishing and being out on the water. The only real “incident” was when Mandy (adept at peeing in the woods but never having done it off a boat) lost her balance with her pants down and fell overboard into the water.

We had a good visit, as always. We ate beignets for breakfast, snowballs at night, and lots of fried seafood in between. We visited with family and friends and came home feeling reconnected with people who are important to all of us.

Meet me in St. Louis

Our first anniversary, but what to do? We only had a weekend; no time to to on a long trip. We didn’t want to camp; there’s not much special about something we do all the time. We don’t like bars and live music, so a trip to Memphis didn’t sound appealing; we aren’t old, so we didn’t want to go to Branson. The romantic cabins at Arkansas’ state parks are either ratty or exorbitantly expensive, or both. The solution?

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A two-night, one-day Amtrak trip to St. Louis! We got on the train about midnight on Friday; as a surprise Bryan upgraded our seats to the tiny “roomette” hoping that we could get some sleep. We did, sort of, and woke up in the suburbs of St. Louis, looking out at the river as the train rolled along. We just had time for a dining-car breakfast before our station.

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First stop: the Arch. Bryan had never seen it, and he needed to. We arrived before the doors opened and rode the first tram to the top. Bryan was entertained by the tiny capsules we rode inside and we both really enjoyed looking out over the city.

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You can see the arch’s shadow in this photo, taken from the little observation area at the top of the arch. Bryan sent a photo to a couple of friends, from 620 feet above the park, and I called his grandmother. We enjoyed listening to other people — the little kids who oohed and aahed over the tiny cars and people below, and the middle aged men who complained and couldn’t ride down fast enough. We also saw the film about the arch’s construction and went through the museum and gift shops. Our advice: get there early. By the time we left, the visitors center was completely packed.

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Just across the street is an old courthouse, also part of the national park though not really connected to the arch in any way I could understand. It’s an impressive building nonetheless with an interesting architectural and legal history, and featured a temporary exhibit of platinum prints, a group of photos taken by a man who floated from somewhere in Tennessee down to the Mississippi and then to the gulf.

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I like Imo’s Pizza, a St. Louis-specific pie made with very thin crust, and after listening to Dewayne talk about it for all these years, Bryan wanted to try it. I hadn’t brought a map or an address but I knew there was an Imo’s on fourth street just south of the interstate. We took off walking toward it, to Bryan’s dismay; the neighborhood got worse and worse and he trailed along behind me, complaining all the way that we were lost and would meet a terrible end. When we finally arrived (it was EXACTLY where I said it would be) he refused to cross the street to go inside. He began quoting Bob Osburn’s opinion that Imo’s wasn’t food at all, but spoiled pizza sauce on a cracker, and began walking the other way.

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While in St. Louis we made good use of their excellent MetroLink light rail. Here’s the station near the north edge of the park with the Arch.

St Louis-1960

We rode the MetroLink to the old Union Station, now converted to a mall. It’s still on the register of historic places, and is an interesting mix of old and new. We walked from Union Station to a microbrewery Bob Osburn had recommended, which I might add was in no better a neighborhood; we actually walked right past a tree with homeless people camped under it. But fortunately for Bryan, the beer was excellent and the soup was even better, so I stopped complaining about my foiled attempts to eat pizza for lunch.

St Louis-1974

From Shlafly’s, the microbrewery, we walked back to Union Station and rode out to Forest Park, where there are a number of nice museums and an excellent zoo. It was a hot day and we only had half an afternoon to see the zoo, so we chose our priorities: I wanted to see the elephants and Bryan was curious about the giant bird cages. We rode back to Union Station and walked to the Amtrak station, where we changed into fresh clothes before boarding the train for Little Rock about nine pm. We arrived home in the wee hours of the morning, another great trip in our journal.

50+ Miles…

Aly and I rode our tandem recumbent trike on what is my longest ride ever today… 51.4 miles. Even though the tandem is rather comfortable, after that long in the chair stuff still hurts if you aren’t used to it.

We’re glad to be home… that post-ride shower and Quizno’s were just what the doctor ordered. Time to take some Vitamin-I now and go to bed.

Benton-Haskell-Poyen-Tull Loop

Share your bike routes @ Bikely.com

Does it ever end?

We decided to spend the weekend doing all the wonderful tasks that come with owning a house figuring we can burn a weekend doing that stuff and not piecemeal it over the rest of the summer.

2009 Tour de Meers

 

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On Memorial Day weekend, we headed west to the Wichita Mountains in southwestern Oklahoma. We arrived at Camp Doris much too late to stake out a camping spot, so we went on to the pasture doubling as registration area for the annual Tour De Meers bike ride. The next morning, cars parked all around us as we staggered around our campsite, changing our clothes and cooking our breakfast. We set out to ride the longest loop, 67 miles, which would have taken us through the wildlife refuge and up through the country north and east of the park; we were turned around at about fifteen miles, though, by a bad thunderstorm. We were disappointed that our ride was only thirty miles long, but happy that this change meant we got to ride through the refuge twice.

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It was a warm day, but we had plenty to drink. We have to remind Mandy to drink enough; it helps to keep powdered drink mix to make the water taste better.

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Whose idea was it to give the little kid the number 69? It wasn’t ours; we each got a bag full of goodies with tshirts, water bottles, ink pens, tourist junk, and our race numbers. The bag that said “Mandy” included a tag with her number on it.

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One of the Wichita Wildlife Refuge’s big attractions is the buffalo that range across big portions of the park. The entrances are protected by cattle guards, which means that the huge animals roam freely up to and across the roads within the refuge. We rode up about fifteen feet from this fellow and another male buffalo; later in the day, we counted nearly sixty females with their calves on a hillside as we passed. Every time we visit we have a buffalo encounter; last time it was a big male heading toward us on a trail in the parallel forest. (We stepped politely aside to let him pass.) This time, the night after our ride, we finally found a place to camp at Doris but unwittingly set up our tent in a favorite buffalo supper spot; Mandy and I ended up stuck inside the tent as we watched a big male buffalo crunching his way slowly toward us. We sat stock still in the tent door and listened to his breath against the grass; he came within about five feet of us before calmly moving on.

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There’s a long-abandoned rock bungalow along one of the roads in the refuge, complete with a cellar, this outbuilding, and what appears to be the remain of a roadside stand of some kind. The shade of the porch made a good picnic spot on Sunday morning, and the hill behind the house proved excellent for kite-flying and lizard-watching.

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Just a we tucked the green kite under our arms to return to the car, a rangers’ truck pulled up into the driveway. Two very serious people came across the yard toward us. “Is everything all right?” I asked. “Is this a non-kite-flying area?” They weren’t sure how to respond to that; apparently not, they supposed we could fly a kite here, but most people don’t, and they thought we might be digging up cactus or something. Apparently we just looked suspicious. I’ve never been almost arrested for flying a kite before.

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On Monday morning, before leaving for home, we left our camp set up and climbed up Little Baldy, a short hike with a very impressive view of the Wichitas including a lake or two and the visitors’ center. We always leave before we want to.

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Here’s a little guy we met on Monday morning. The warm pink granite boulders in the Wichitas shelter lots of lizards, and they tantalize Mandy; they’re friendly enough to be interesting and ALMOST slow enough to catch. Also on Monday, I frightened a snake sunning itself in my path; he slithered quickly up a nearby tree and almost lost himself in its branches. Another favorite of Mandy’s is the prairie dogs in the “town” near one of the roads; she could sit, stock still, and watch them for an hour or two if we’d let her.

Butterfield Trail

Mandy and I hadn’t been backpacking together, just the two of us, in quite awhile, so I planned a trip for the weekend after Mother’s Day. Mandy had been wanting a “real” pack of her own, and Bryan and I agreed that it would be nice for us to give her more of her own gear to carry, so this trip gave us a good excuse to get her one. Here’s a photo of a very happy Mandy the night she got her new Osprey Ace 48 pack. (Note the purple print fuzzy footy pajamas.)

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I settled on the Butterfield Trail, a 15-mile loop starting in Devil’s Den State Park in northwest Arkansas and extending into the National Forest. On Thursday night, the weather forecast called for 100% chance of rain on Saturday, so I packed rain gear and extra clothes in case of a downpour. I wasn’t able to get a campsite at the state park for Friday night, but I called a friend near Devil’s Den and asked to pitch a tent in his yard.

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Mandy and I left town at six o’clock on Friday night and headed to John’s house. When we arrived, I saw lightning in the distance and opted to leave the tent packed and sleep in the back of the car. About eleven, Bryan saved this radar image. I was glad for the solid roof during the night storm.

Saturday’s weather was a little damp but not unpleasant. We shared the trail with about thirty boyscouts and several interesting bugs. Here’s a photo of one of the weirder woolly worms we saw.

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And here’s a short video of the world’s smallest inchworm.

[insert inchworm video here]

The tiny inchworm was pleasant company during a forced stop beside the trail. We’d passed all the boy scout groups and were enjoying having the woods to ourselves when Mandy got a nosebleed. We had to sit eating jellybeans and watching them troop by. “Do you need anything?” “No, we’re fine.” “Well, it’s a pretty place to have a nosebleed, I guess.”

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This spring’s excessive rain has made everything muddy and gross. Since foot traffic shares a lot of this trail with horses, anyplace that’s the least bit damp becomes a deep, goopy mess. We had to bypass lots of fallen trees and big mudholes. All the drainages were running with water.

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We passed the turnout for the boy scout camp about three in the afternoon. (We’d spent the day with thirty boys and wanted to spend the night away from them.) We somehow turned onto a high horse trail and away from the Butterfield, but the excellent map we’d bought for a buck at the visitors center indicated that if we continued on, we’d meet up with our loop again. The accidental bypass was one of the more pleasant stretches of the trail!

All the rain has caused some slumping between miles 11 and 12. There were cracks in the trail, some big enough to put a basketball in. At one point part of the trail has fallen two or three feet.

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We hiked about nine miles on Saturday and decided to call it quits about 6 pm. We set up the tent while waiting for our supper to cook, and were in bed by dark. It had been overcast and damp all day but had never rained at all.

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Sunday morning we slept in a bit, then cooked breakfast before packing up. As usual, we didn’t leave camp until about ten, and just as we got down to the trail, we met up with the first group of boy scouts. It was the same small group we’d started with the day before, and we’d hike near them for the rest of the trip. At the end, as we were putting our poles on our packs, they left the woods too.

We hiked to the visitor center to meet Harry Harnish, the “Bat Man of Devil’s Den.” He’s been an interpreter at the park for twenty-some years and has done eleventy hundred bat education programs for school kids and adults. Since he’ll be retiring this summer, we wanted to go on his guided hike of the crevice area in the park. We enjoyed it thoroughly and even got to see a pair of baby black vultures from just a few feet away, since he showed us their nest in the bottom of a crevice.

[insert Harry photo here if possible]

We ate excellent Mexican food in Alma and were home before bedtime. It was a good weekend for both of us.

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White Nose Style

Recently, Little Rock Grotto decided it wanted some new shirts and several things fell into place nicely.

* White Nose Syndrome was in the news
* Brian Gould promised to hook LRG up with a great price on the shirts
* And Aly came up with a clever design

We took a couple of photos of the shirt tonight. The front features the LRG logo while the back promotes White Nose Syndrome awareness (and a strategy to aid the decontamination procedure).

LRG WNS Shirt (1 of 2)-2

LRG WNS Shirt (2 of 2)

Commute to Work

Well… I’ve ridden my bike home from work before but today Aly is riding her bike to a work related training session at the 4H Center ~17 miles north of here. Yay her! This is why she’s leading her office team in the Walk Across Arkansas challenge and she’ll do this today and tomorrow.

Did I mention there was a chance of rain today? Hopefully she makes it up there sweaty and not rainy.

4H (1 of 2)

A quick ride before dinner

Today, Mandy and I took the GTT out for a ten mile ride around town. This ride pushed me over 100 miles for March 🙂 We’ve been trying to ride every day and we’re hit and miss. We’ll get the whole weather + cooking + chores + homework + riding thing down though.

Our new clipless shoes work really well… I didn’t realize how much effort it took to keep your feet on the pedals without them.