PRETTY LIGHTS
Well, kids, I don't think you will be sorry you missed this trip, or maybe you will. Either way here is what happened.
We started out at 8pm on Friday night to drive to Ozark, AR for the first leg of the journey. We ended up getting pulled over by the State Troopers in Oklahoma, for doing 77 in a 70…I had the cruise control set at about 74, so I think it was because we had just top a hill and it hadn’t slowed us back down yet, but anyways, first question out his mouth is “This your car?”…Um…yeah…last time I checked. He didn’t run my license or anything and just told us to slow it down a bit. I think the real deal was he was just afraid of Lola and RayRay (our very small dogs) in the back of the car. He was actually a pretty nice guy.
PARK AND SLEEP
So after that we finish the drive into Ozark, AR at 4am…find the road side park, park the car (under extremely bright lights next to a very loud 18 wheeler), lay the sleeping bags out on the folded down back seats, slide my feet down into the trunk and attempt to sleep with the noise and the light. I think it would have been ok if not for waking up soaked from sweat due to the heat and not being able to roll the windows all the way down for fear of one of the dogs jumping out. So at 6am we are up, after about 1 to 1.5 hours of sleep. Dogs peed, teeth brushed, lines rubbed out of face…time to go to McDonald’s for breakfast. Yes, normally this is a huge no no, but they are the closest thing with free wifi.
NO PORK
So, we walk in and survey the room full of what appears to be fairly “special” people. I order the big breakfast with hot cakes and no sausage…”Oh!”, she says with confused startled eyes and short pause, “OH…OH….you want bacon instead, ok.”…um “No.” I reply…”Unless you have something in beef to put on the plate, I don’t want any meat.” A new wave of confusion crosses her face, but she removes the sausage, along with my syrup and hash brown which I had to ask for both…oh and the butter. And for ONCE!!!...take note of when it happened and where (which is really ironic) your mother ordered something and it came out right; while mine came out wrong….little miracles do happen and I am glad, even though it was just oatmeal. So after eating, we looked at houses on the internet…we made out our map, and hit the road.
AND IT BEGINS
First house, just north of Ozark. Um…somewhere…yeah…so we head up into the mountains and soon find Pink Twist Road, which is not very pink, but very twisted. We also, find that the house was nowhere to be found at the spot the GPS indicated. Hmm…well…maybe it’s down the road further; you know how these stupid GPS units work. So off we go further into the mountains. Still no house, but no turning back now… I am sure a main highway is just around the next bend…or the next one…ok, maybe it’s after all these switch backs…sigh…out of e-juice. I ask your mother to fill up the little e-juice reservoir. She drops the reservoir cap under the seat...and my comment was "Please tell me you didn't just drop that under the seat."….so we stop and spend the next 10 to 15 minutes moving seats and bags looking for a piece of grey plastic on a grey carpet. Oh, and I forgot to mention…Pink Twist Road is a dirt road and we had not seen a house in several miles…we were all alone…alone…alone…Ok it didn’t echo when I said it, but no one would have heard us if we screamed or echoed for that matter. So eventually we find the little cap and get the e-cig ready for another round of stressful puffing while I navigate the Dodge Intrepid down the dirt road from the pit of hell…(oh wait this is the one from middle hell, the one in the pit we find later in our adventure).
IT'S SO PRETTY....yeah pretty till we go off the edge......
As we wind our way through “Squeal like a pigland!” Your mother takes note of how pretty everything is; while, I grunt my approval and try not to kill us or tear up the car (yes, a Dodge Intrepid is a car, front wheel drive…not a 4 wheel drive truck; well that’s what the guys who designed it said, but I completely disagree). I love it when you are driving around corners and trying not to die, how passengers inform you of how “pretty” everything is and how you should “OH! Look over there!”, “Where, what?!”, “AAHHH!! Watch what you are doing!! Stay on the road!!!”, “But you said look over there!! It’s pretty!” anyways I digress, but long story short, as a driver you don’t get to see all that much of anything but the road when driving.
DODGE INTREPID LIMBO
So about, 17 miles into our 25 mile (10 to 12 miles of which were on the dirt road) journey to see a house and then find our way back to the main highway, we start to notice fallen trees and small branches and wash outs in the road. Hmm…looks like a storm came through here. We begin our decent down, note the word “down”, some switch backs into a valley and as we come around the corner of one we find ourselves facing a large fallen tree across the road…hmm…narrow road…”down” switch backs…path blocked by fallen tree…um…back up…no…turn around…no…attempt to squeeze car under fallen tree before (didn’t want to know) checking to see what is holding the large fallen tree about 5 feet off the ground on one side of the road…yeah sounds like plan! Ouch, that limb hanging off that tree sounded like it starched the roof of the car as I squeezed under the tree, barely, and attempt to navigate the ditch next to us. The whole time praying to God the tree didn’t suddenly decide to dislodge itself and slide the rest of the way down the mountain…the really strange thing is that your mother for some reason did “NOT” take a picture of this tree. We are still scratching our heads about that one.
NONE SHALL PASS
We continued down to the valley floor and the road became even more narrow. Suddenly, a fence appears and so does the sign “No Trespassing”. Hmm…again…backup or turn around…no…couldn’t even if I wanted to…so off we go through a really “pretty” pasture with multiple “No Trespassing” signs. Oh, and your mother did get a picture of the old barn in the pasture. No one shot at us or even yelled at us, but we were glad to see an extremely narrow concrete bridge going over a small creek lined with trees which, thank the Good Lord, hid an asphalt highway on the other side of it. So this concludes the first piece of our Journey.
ON THE ROAD TO SOUTHERN MISSOURI
We plug the address of the next house into the GPS (cause we saw how well this worked earlier today…right), and off we go. I am going to shorten this next part of the trip slightly:
- Drove down Pig Trails Scenic Highway – Ok, 2 things, 1. This makes me thing of Pig entrails. 2. How did a pig trail become a highway. Ok 3 things…3. Did the pigs know it was scenic when they used it?
- Next, we passed through Huntsville, where we stopped to get gas and let the dogs pee. While we were there we saw the only two gentlemen “from the hood” anywhere in that part of Arkansas getting pulled over by the Highway Patrol.
- Passed through Cannibal…I mean Cabanal, AR…just made us think of the word Cannibal.
- Then through Berryville, AR uneventfully, but the next time we see it is after visiting the pit of hell.
- Finally reach Carr Lane, MO (yes, Missouri).
GPS MISSED AGAIN
So, the second house, is not where it is supposed to be either and after several attempts and visiting someone else’s “No Trespassing” property, we give up and call the Real Estate agent to find out where the h-e double L this house is…oh…it went under contract yesterday afternoon…….um…..^%$#@$$#@!^%&**…OK!!!! Deep breaths. Next house….. (At this time we had been driving for approximately 5 hours on windy roads, up and down…we all have a bit of motion sickness by now, and your mother has had at least 8 heart attaches due to my driving…one more is all it will take…”Look honey, no hands!!”) Blue Eye, MO here we come. Guess what!!! This house is where it is supposed to be AND the For Sale sign is still up on it!! Amazing…but it’s not exactly what we are looking for, well maybe…we don’t think…hmm…we’ll think about it. The land is nice and the shop is nice and large, but the house is small with very few windows. The access to the lake down the road about a mile is great, but the black tire marks up and down the road cause me to pause and think. Hmm…either really bad drivers have been here or they are done on purpose. It finally hits me, almost literally, on our way back to Blue Eye from the house, as a speeding car of teenagers go flying down the road in a very LaRgE old car to the lake access point. The High School was just down the road from the house in the opposite direction from the lake, so I put to and too together and figured out that the lake access point was the local high school kids hang out place to go swimming, etc. , and they “intentionally” (most of the time I assume) left the black marks on the road. Sigh, next house…Back to Arkansas…Omaha to be exact.
THIS IS SUCH A DRAG
So after almost rear-ending a truck while it was making a quick stop with all the other trucks to go to a local auction (which looked pretty good actually), we made it back to the main highway and find the road leading to Omaha. Ok, so I missed the road the first time and we had to drive about 2 or 3 more miles before we could turn around and go back to it, but this is nothing compared to our future attempt to eat in Hollister, MO. Oh, look that is a nice looking house and it’s where the GPS said it would be, but wait, someone is looking at it already, and…oh no…you can see the 4 lane highway from the back porch. That’s a little too close for us, so on to the next house on the list, but wait, what is that I see…a sign saying another house is for sale down a road over here going away from the highway…hmm well we are here already, wouldn’t hurt to check it out. So off down “ANOTHER” dirt road we go…yeah…I don’t learn. Oh this is kind of a nice area, but…this road is even narrower than the one we were on earlier today. It only has two “trails” for the tires to run down. We come upon a very nice large home and then just past it two pastures appear. We don’t find a “No Trespassing” sign this time, but the road (trail) has barb wire fence and rock mounds running down the sides of it. Again, let’s not forget we are in a Dodge Intrepid…this becomes very import in about 3, 2, 1...”Holy crap!, Stop, Stop, Stop!!” your mother is yelling as we here a gawdawful noise from the car bottoming out on the very large rocks lining the middle of the road (trail, and in my own defense they did not look like they were “that” big). So I hit the brakes. We have a wash out on the little tire trail to the left, so I am pushed up on the right of the “road” trying to miss it when we bottom out. So, ok, we are not going to see this house. We put the car in reverse and start to try to turn around…I did mention, narrower road (tire trails) than earlier, wash out, rock piles, and barb fence, right? So needless to say my attempt to turn around is not successful. I start attempting to back my way down the tire trails, let’s face it, it’s not a road, so I am not going to call it that anymore, with my lovely wife as navigator. She only had to hit me or yell at me 2 or 3 times when I almost hit the barb wire fence, went off in the washout, and bounced along the top of the rock piles on the side of the road. We finally backed all the way down, about 500 feet, to the “nice big” house we passed earlier. We backed into their drive way to our embarrassment and turned around. We shot back down the tire trails to the main road at a blazing 5 to 10 miles an hour with our tails between our legs. Whew, all this car and ego destroying has made me hungry, so let’s go eat. Little did I know my ego, my sanity, and my marriage would soon be brought into question in the small town of Hollister, MO.
WHO THE HECK DESIGNED THIS.....please, someone send me his name....need to chat.....
Ok, all the houses we had marked to look at in this area we either found and didn’t like, or couldn’t find them, so before we headed out to the 2 in Mountain Home, AR, we thought we would do one last look on the internet. Hmm…where to get free wifi…yep, Mickie D’s. So off we head to McDonalds in Hollister, MO just down the road. As we near Hollister we see a sign indicating McD’s is off the next exit. It looked like a normal exit…road gradually bearing off to the right from the highway…go down it…make a simple left turn… another turn left … and wallah! Into the McDonald’s parking lot…right? NO!!! Not even close!!! I don’t know what kind of moron created this exit to the Netherworld of dotted lines, not driveways, cement walls, and overall driver confusion, but I have a special round just for him. This is the craziest crap I have ever seen. I will try to explain.So down the exit ramp we went and soon noticed it split again, one to right and one to left, well McD’s is to the left.
We take the left fork only to discover it appears to U-turn back on to 65. Ok, that should be alright, we will go in the front drive of McD’s instead of the side one. 
We get back on the highway and drive about 2 miles before turning around and attempting this again. Back at the exit ramp we find the same left and right split…we take the left and stop at the red light. As I review the many dotted lines on the road, I see what appears to be a line leading to a road that leads to another road that will allow me to turn into the parking lot of McD’s. I tell your mother, “I am going straight over there to that road when the light turns green”…she disagrees very much with this action due to the large number of vehicles on the opposite side of the road that appear as if they will hit us head on. At this point I inform her “I don’t give a blankity blank if they do…I am going down that road.” The light turns green and what do you know we make it to the road without getting hit because this is actually the way the stupid thing was designed work unbeknownst to us. We turn down the road to McD’s and pull in to the parking lot, only to discover a large yellow bus in the lot.
Overview of the intersection.
TO McD OR NOT TO McD
Oh…no…as we drove around and peered inside we see a large group of what appears to be high school girls in shorts. I assume volley ball or soft ball. Earlier in my life this would have been a bonus to eating at McD’s, but now I am too old, married, short on patience, short on time, and too many eyes drilling into me from passenger seat for this to be a good thing, so I grumble some choice words and head back out to the mix master to find another restaurant with less gabbing females and free wifi. After circling several parking lots, we find another restaurant full of high school girls and no free wifi, so we head off back to McD’s hoping they had at least finished ordering.
SHOULD HAVE JUST GOT MEALS ON WHEELS
Luckily they were all done ordering, but the noise in the place was ridiculous. Giggle giggle, oh Mary did you hear, oh oh come over here I want tell you ..whisper..whisper… it was just nuts. Ok, so we get our food and sit down and try to eat it. Lucky for us the only 4 “studs” in Hollister come sit next to us in their Body Armor golf shirts, cool shades, designer hats, and expensive shoes. I couldn’t tell if they were trying to play golf, tennis, or basketball, but they were all in their 30’s unmarried and thought they wuz too cool. So we listened to them attempt intelligent conversation as we ate among the giggling girls. Finally, the playboys and the girls left, we finished our meal and began looking for houses….NOTHING. We found nothing to go look at and determined the two in Mountain Home, AR were too expensive for us to take time to go look. So, in our frustration we chose 3 houses we didn’t really think would work, but what the heck we are up here already anyways. Our…mistake…..
NEVER GO HERE AGAIN
So we head off to look at a 3 bedroom, brick home, on 20 acres, with 8 acres pasture, a creek in front of it, and a spring fed pond just south of Berryville, remember the comment 3 pages back about Berryville and coming out of hell, well you are about to come to understand its meaning. Again, the GPS finds us the most interesting, frustrating, car destroying path possible. We turn off of the main road on to a dirt road just east of Berryville, and begin making our way down to where we believe the house is located. It turns out we could have just driven over to Berryville and turned down the Hwy 21 and then off on county road 560 instead of taking an over the mountain dirt road tour. Once we reached hwy 21 we turned and headed down to Cabanal, which we soon realized we had been to this morning going the other way. By this time we had been driving most of the day with little success on back roads with very little sleep, so needless to say we were very touchy. We turned off hwy 21 on to county road 560. As we drove down past the ruined houses and tore up single wide mobile homes scattered randomly alongside the road, we came to be in the presence of the largest A-framed house I have ever seen. It was a hippie utopia or something…we aren’t sure…It was 3 stories tall…had what appeared to be gardens of some form around it and some really weird art here and there. Sounds kind of nice, but it wasn’t …it was extremely creepy and disturbing… So we passed it rather quickly. Then as we continued to travel we found many homes that should not have still been lived in, but apparently were. We came to the “location” of where the house was supposed to be only to find trees and bushes. Once again our faithful GPS had led us to our destination with the accuracy of a blind man shooting an arrow at a target 100 yards way after being spun around 50 times. We decide to continue down the road to see if we had just come up short. Sure enough about another half mile down the road we find the "paradise" that was described in the listing. Well, assuming the listing was a hoax and we wanted to be lied to so we would have a reason to travel the backwoods of Arkansas. After our disappointment we continued down the road because as everyone knows dirt roads have to hit main roads eventually, right? Well, as we continued to look for the “main” road, we passed a “house”, or something, right down from the one we just left. It had starving dogs hanging around out front and what appeared to be a fake monkey hanging from a rope around its neck on the porch. Yeah, we didn’t stop, nor pause to take time to consider or understand what we were seeing, we just kept moving. And it was a very long “eventually”, but we did end up finding the main road and making it back into Berryville. That part of the trip was the deal breaker.
HOMEWARD HO!
I was so upset and sick of long dirt back roads with creepy houses and only having an hour of sleep, I lost it. After several rants about several topics with several words I won’t mention here, it was decided to head back home instead of wasting the money spending the night in Arkansas. This little episode took place at 5pm by the way. The trip home was fairly uneventful, but extremely long. We made it to the Texas border by 11pm and your mother wanted to stop at the rest area there and sleep until 6am and then finish the trip. I didn’t really want to, but I saw the wisdom, and the back of my eyelids, and decided it was a good idea. This time we only had the bright lights, but no truck noise to comfort our sleep. However, the heat was much worse and I ended up waking up at about 1am after only sleeping about an hour or so. I was hot, sweaty and feeling a little claustrophobic. I don’t remember what I did to wake up your mother, but she woke up and I told her I had to get out. Ok, no problem, but once out of the car, I wasn’t that tired, so I walked up to the bathroom and back, but could not convince myself to get back in the hot car and sleep with my legs in the confined trunk space. I decided to set in the front passenger seat instead. Your mother said turn on the car and let it cool off for a bit, but even with that I couldn’t go back to sleep. Finally, about 2:30pm or so, I woke her up and said “can we go now?” I hated to interrupt her sleep, but I could not sit there any longer. She said, “sure whatever” and lay back down. I started up the car and start heading home. It was a long sleepy trip.
SOMEONE ALMOST DIES
Soon your mother crawled over the seats into the passenger seat, not exactly with words of encouragement, but she did become much nicer as the night went on, even though I had woken her up before she was ready and before any sane man would have. Though she was still not any happier about traveling with only 3 hours sleep in 2 nights, we continued on while dozing on and off. We were moving along at good pace and flew through Dallas without a hitch. The scariest part of the trip did not take place until just outside of Waco. Traveling around 70 mph (because I didn’t want to get pulled over again), a black mass suddenly appeared on the road in front of us with many smaller forms around it. There was no time do anything, and before I could react the car’s right tires rolled over the mass with loud “BANGs and THUMPS”. It turns out the black mass was not evil or from the pits of hell, but rather pieces of a blown truck tire. This tire did provide the 9th major heart attack for your mother and we almost lost her right there in the car. If she would have been asleep when we hit it, I am sure I would be planning a funeral this morning because it would have scared her to death. We pulled over and checked the tires, but found them to be full of air and not leaking. It did however, rip the wind dam underneath in half. No other damage is noticeable, so we continued our trek.
HOME AGAIN
We finally pulled into the drive of our home at 6am in the morning and hit the sack until noon. We got up, ate brunch, and had some coffee.
LESSONS LEARNED
The trip, though, a complete failure for finding our new home was anything but boring, and we learned where we did not want live. The experience was frustrating, happy, funny, scary, entertaining, and sometimes creepy, but it was worth having, even though we did not find our objective. These are the times and memories that last a life time. You tell them to your grand-kids and kids so you can watch and hear them laugh with joy, while letting them know you are not perfect. This also tells them you have experienced many things and hope your stories and advice will help them have better more enjoyable experiences than you. It also teaches them to cherish each and every experience whether good, bad, or ugly.
The moral of the story is “When you find creepy houses on the back roads in the Ozarks because your GPS is more lost than you, while looking for the home of your dreams, don’t stop to find out who lives there, but remember every moment so you can prove to others you are not the weirdest, creepy, person on the planet.”
And the second moral is “Don’t forget to relish the unique experience found in each of those creepy houses on the back roads.”