got up around 8:15am and had a mediocre at best continental breakfast. left around 10am. the ride after mcalister was very pretty — lots of green and bodies of water. stopped in muskogee for a photo op around 11:30am. got a little lost, but nothing too bad. got to arkansas around 1:30pm. nice weather until close to fayetteville…the roads were wet, but it didn’t rain on us. it appeared to have poured quite recently though. we actually didn’t get rained on the whole day. very nice. driving through fayetteville was sort of weird because i remembered the place very well, and it was because of tamara. (i still don’t understand how she’s come to the conclusion that our relationship and marriage has no value now, that she feels no bond or desire for us to continue. what happened to her? whatever happened, and however, it is very sad she sees nothing now.) we stopped and ate at the aq chicken house, which was a place tamara and i ate several times and really liked a lot. it was good. we left there around 4pm, and promptly got lost. after meandering around, linc had wanted to stop by the pea ridge civil war park, but when we got there it was closed. we left and hit missouri a little before 6pm. we then took a couple of roads through the mark twain park that had a lot of sharp curves and drops and such. i hit the back of my heel on the road in turns three times, but only the first time did it cause me to instinctively bounce upright…which set me on a course straight off the road. the white line was the edge of the pavement (no shoulder at all), and i rode it for awhile at probably at least 30 miles an hour. i was pretty close to going off into the grass and then who knows what would have happened. but i didn’t, so everything is fine. once again i sent us off on the wrong course and we ended up very near branson. we turned around and got back on track and rode into springfield around 8:30pm. we checked into a hotel 7 (humorously between a motel 6 and super 8, all right in a row) just off of i-44.
day 3 — oklahoma, arkansas, missouri, and near death experiences
note: this is one of a number of entries that were lost in a server crash, followed by a desktop crash, back in late 2004. on march 1, 2009, i happened on a cache file on the crashed desktop hard drive, so i am reloading all of the entries with their original date and time values intact for posterity.