Daily Little Rock-ing on Tour: Route 66, Day 1

We did not have a laptop with us after all, so now I'll try to go back and re-create the trip.

Saturday, May 12, 2007: From Little Rock, AR, to Oklahoma City, OK, where we picked up Route 66 to Amarillo, TX

This stretch goes through a lot of farmland.

Our maps and directions on where to find and follow Route 66 weren't that great, so we did a lot of turning around on this day. We drove back and forth on one stretch of road three times before being able to figure out where Route 66 picked up on the other side of a highway that crossed it. It looked like some new road construction had taken place since our maps were printed, Good thing it was pretty here!

This is a 28-span bridge we crossed in Oklahoma, after driving around for a while looking for the road.

Windmills in Oklahoma, closing in on the Texas border. Both of the above photos were taken from a moving car. We had stopped a lot earlier, not realizing we would be eating up a lot of time getting lost. ;)

On this day, when we turned around on a side street one of the many times we couldn't find the road, a pack of barking dogs chased us back to the highway. Little did we know at the time, but packs of barking dogs would be a recurring theme on our trip.

Linda didn't get out of the car too much the first day, since she became convinced before we even started the trip that she would be bitten by a rattlesnake. We saw bees, packs of dogs, a couple roadrunners, one antelope, and a slew of farm animals, but no rattlesnakes. In fact, the only snakes we ever saw were smooshed ones in the road.

Tags: Route 66, Travel, Road Trip

Daily Little Rock-ing on Tour

Starting Saturday, Daily Little Rock-ing will hit the road -- the Mother Road, that is.

Assuming the laptop-borrowing situation does not fall through and  Internet access is available, updates will be made from various points on Route 66, between Oklahoma City and Santa Monica.

Yes, I realize I haven't updated in more than a year. Eh, so what? Absence makes the heart grow fonder, right?

Tags: travel, Route 66, Little Rock, Arkansas

Home opener

Did everyone go to the home opening game for the Travs? Yes, they lost, but it was still a great game! If you like the Travelers, you should check out the best Travs blog on the Web: Travelerocity. Go take a look, even though the blogger hasn't returned the favor by adding a link to my blog (but has no problem e-mailing me "friendly" reminders to update!)

 

Another one bites the dust

These are scans of manipulated Polaroid SX-70 prints. The first photo was taken/manipulated about two weeks ago. The second one was done a couple of years ago. Polaroid has stopped making SX-70 film, so whatever is on the market now is all that is left. No more photo-squishing fun for me! If anyone finds any boxes/cartons/crates of SX-70 anywhere, let me know!

No observations, astute or otherwise, today. Just something I've been debating with myself: Is Pee Wee Herman scarier as a doll, or as a live human?

Ice, ice everywhere but nary a chunk to keep my food cold

I'm sure everyone has stopped checking for entries here (all three people who ever read this blog), but surprise! Here I am again.

I cheated with the photo above--it is not from the most recent Little Rock "ice storm;" it's from 2000, when we really had some ice.

And on that note...a little bit of advice for Little Rock drivers (except me, of course): If you don't know how to drive on ice, STAY HOME. Thank you.

Now, I should explain that icy roads in Little Rock are a lot more dangerous than icy roads in Peabody, Mass., because in Peabody, the sand trucks are eventually going to come along and soon you'll be driving on brown mush instead of ice. Here, if you don't see a sand truck ahead of you, and there isn't one looming in your rearview mirror, ain't none coming.

Oh, I saw a couple of the trucks driving down the street when the sleet started late Friday/early Saturday, but they weren't spewing any sand out the back. I don't know what they were doing. Enjoying the scenery, I guess.

If you live in Little Rock and only drive on ice once every two to three years, yet absolutely insist on going out to get that six-pack of PBR you forgot when you went out for bread-milk-eggs-and-oh-yeah-corndogs-will-be-yummy-when-we're-iced-in,heed this advice:

1. If you're going to brake, brake to slow down before you get to the ice. Brakes don't work on ice. You slide.

2. If you're already sliding on ice, don't step on the gas. Acceleration doesn't work on ice. You slide more.

3. If you have 4-wheel-drive, practice when it's warm and sunny, so you'll know what to do when it's icy.

4. If you own a pick-up or SUV, stay home so you don't wreck my car with it.

I couldn't believe the first winter I was here and we got, oh, 8 inches of snow. I was driving to work and saw all these abandoned pick-up trucks slid off the side of the road; so many that I thought it must be a joke or some kind of Southern "yay it's snowing" tradition. Nope. The drivers just didn't know what they were doing. You don't even want to hear about the SUV's I've seen flipped upside down.

Shouldn't natural selection have killed off all these people by now?

So, in other exciting news, my refrigerator quit working today. I have all my food in two friends' refrigerator/freezers until it is repaired. Which is funny, because it's been warm all winter until this weekend, when it actually dropped below freezing. Yet my freezer won't keep anything colder than 50. I realize I could just put everything in my car and it would stay chilled, but who wants to drive around with a grocery store in the back seat?

Oh, what wonders will tomorrow bring?

Infrared

I wish they had "sleepy" listed as a mood, because that's what I'm feeling right now.

I'm taking an infrared photography workshop at the Arts Center. The photo above is of a little shack behind a burned-out nursing home on Highway 5, going toward Hot Springs. The photo needs some work (haven't been to the darkroom yet, just scanned the negative), but I still like the way it looks. I think I'll need to burn a few more rolls of film before I start to get the hang of this.

 

White Christmas (almost)

It's actually snowing two days before Christmas. In Little Rock!

As soon as it started, everybody downtown decided they needed to leave work and go home. They got in their cars, and it was worse than rush hour traffic. It took people 20 minutes to drive 4 blocks, and 2 hours to drive 3 miles. They probably bought the stores out of bread and milk, too, for a 3-inch snow that'll be gone tomorrow.

On days like this (and there aren't many) I'm glad I live a four-minute walk from where I work!