Missouri and Arkansas

Joe and I arrived in Baltimore last night. I'm going to write about the last week in several sections, since so much happened and I didn't have any chance to update. Things really picked up in the south. Last Friday we drove to St. Louis where we went up in arch and explored the City Museum. The St. Louis City museum is amazing, it's just a giant 4 story playground for grown ups.

We left late that night and drove about an hour deeper into Missouri. This is where shit started getting pretty real. After passing scores of closed fireworks and adult toy warehouse stores, we exited the highway near Merimac State Park. When we finally found the campsite which Joe's book had recommended, we were greeted by a drunk, shirtless, middle aged southern man who told us that the site has been closed for at least 3 years. He proceded to keep us parked in the entrance area while he explained to us how he had bought a country song from a man in St. Louis for $20,000 and was trying to record it with his friend to play at Branson next year and go platinum together. Clearly this man was going to make a fortune.

We drove around the area for a while, but had no luck finding a campsite. We settled for a motel near the park which the shirtless man had described as "...pretty dirty, but surely they must have cleaned it up by now..." They hadn't. I was under the impression that this type of motel only existed in movies, but then again I'd never been to Missouri before. We cut a deal with the woman at the front desk and paid $35 for a room with 2 beds. She suggested that we not use the bed closer to the door, because it might be damp, since the bed was just shampooed. When Joe asked, "Can we smoke in the room?" her response was, "Oh, y'all can do anything you want in this room."

The room smelled like cigarettes, garbage, and sex, and every surface had a thin layer of sticky dust. The draw next to our bed contained a bible and some sticky blue puddles. The bathroom had no toilet paper. The woman who had checked us in stopped by to drop off towels. She assured us that she had just washed them, and not to worry about the huge brown stains all over them. We slept in our sleeping bags on top of the beds.

The next morning we got in touch with Lucas, who was now in Arkansas at his friend Jesse's lake house. We checked out as fast as we could, stopped by the Jesse James wax museum next door, and hauled ass down to Little Rock. Never in my life have I seen so many confederate flags and gun stores in such a short period of time. Within 30 minutes of arriving, we each took 2 shots of Jack Daniel's and jumped in the lake naked. Jesse's family was very friendly, but, not surprisingly, the idea of veganism didn't really click for them, and I only consumed corn on the cob and beer for the 24 hours we stayed there.

The next morning we went with Jesse's family to a rodeo where her brother was participating in the novice bull riding. Their father had been a champion bull rider in the 80's, so they were all quite proud to see him following in his father's footsteps. I also had no idea that bull riding meant tying a rope around a bulls enourmous scrotum and tightening it until he bucked his rider off. After 10 minutes of prayers and the national anthem, the ball squeezing, I mean bull riding began. The highlight of the rodeo was definetely the "mutton busting" section, where 4-8 year-olds tryed their luck on sheep. Each kid was thrown off within several seconds, then stood up and looked around and started bawling. "The embarrassment is terrible." explained Jesse's stepfather.

We left the rodeo early and drove into the night until we reached a campsite in northwestern Arkansas. At this point Lucas had decided to just join us on the road so that he could get a ride back to Jersey. We got our of the car and the air was literally thick with mosquitos in a way which I had never experienced before. We scrambled to get the tent up and passed out around 1am. I was woken up twice in the morning. The first time was at 7:30am by Joe. It was pouring rain outside and he was screaming, "Quick, pack up, we have to go NOW!" Annoyed and disoriented, I watched Joe and Lucas scrambling to pack up for several minutes before deciding adamently against waking up. Joe finally agreed that it might make more sense to wait out the rain after all, and we all passed out again. 2 hours later I was woken up by a cow mooing 20 feet from my head. At this point we decided to check out and get back on the road toward Tennessee.