Day 24 - Wednesday, August 12 (Drive from Canute, Oklahoma to Mountainburg, Arkansas)

Short drive today, but a long trip.

We are now back in the land of low elevation and high humidity, and the lack of AC is a real drag that takes its toll. Normally, when I drive any length of time, I enjoy listening to music, being with my thoughts, or talking with Vicki or the others. For over half of our 6000 mile trip, we have had to endure the blast of 95 degree wind to avoid sweating to death in the oven of our van, which means sweating for 6-9 hours while listening to a hurricane. And this after spending $1000 before and $200 during the trip to make sure the AC was in good shape. Today we realized that we will have to make some adjustments in the east, like traveling early (starting at 4 am) to avoid the highway during the hottest hours of the day.

The day began easily enough, sleeping in late (as usual) and enjoying a leisurely breakfast (oatmeal and bagels). We were blessed to have a shaded campsite, and didn’t get away until 11:00. After passing through Oklahoma City, we stopped for lunch and gas in Shawnee and I got pretty cranky with everyone. As we got back on the highway, I knew the heat had something to do with my attitude, but it was more than that. Interstate 40 through Oklahoma runs near the terminus of the infamous Trail of Tears, and is littered with names of tribes uprooted from their homelands in the east, from the Seminole to the Cherokee. Today, the highway is also littered with billboards for the many casinos.

Then and now, this road is paved with broken dreams. So I think it was more than the heat that got to me.

We also passed lots of towns that claimed notoriety based on famous sons and daughters. Yesterday, at the end of the trip, we saw a sign that let us know Elk City was the birthplace of Susan Powell, the 1981 Miss America winner who went on to have a career in opera. Today, we saw a sign that proclaimed Weatherford as the birthplace of Thomas P. Stafford, the astronaut who made the first flight of the lunar module to the moon in 1969 and commanded the Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975. And as we passed Okemah, 70 miles east of Oklahoma City, a sign let us know that we were passing the birthplace of Woody Guthrie, a folk musician nicknamed “the Dustbowl Troubadour” who wrote “This Land is Your Land”.

Just after 3 pm, we crossed into Arkansas and turned north on 540 for the final 15 miles to Fort Smith Lake State Park, at the western edge of the Ozark Mountains. We set up quickly and had supper before driving to Fort Smith, 30 miles southwest, to buy groceries and to find a theater showing the sixth Harry Potter movie. We got the groceries, but the GPS flubbed the first theater address (it routed us to a golf course!). We had a backup plan, and drove further south, across the Arkansas River, through the weather beaten town of Fort Smith, and found the Carmike 14 off Waco Street, where we got the whole theater to ourselves for the 8:00 show. We enjoyed the movie, popcorn and Coke and got back home just before midnight, where we crashed for another night under the stars.