Enid MS to BeeBee AR
Mud and rain! We started off at around 7am. The Jeep’s always packed up before we go to bed so just 30 seconds to pull the top down and we are ready to hit the road. Filled up with gas and got back on the trail which was gravel right from the start. The road started out dry and we made it all the way to the Mississippi River before lunch and stopped at a casino on the Mississippi side but didn’t like the machines so left without playing anything. Headed across to river to West Helena Arkansas.
Our clothes, the Jeep, and probably us were really starting to smell so doing laundry was a priority today. We stopped at the first one we found in Helena which looked ok but turned out to be a bit sketchy.
Some homeless was arguing with another guy that he wasn’t homeless, F#$^ this and MF that, and somebodies going to get their ass kicked..blah blah blah.
The second guy told us he was harmless and just ignore him but it wasn’t a pleasant place. We went out to the Jeep, rolled the windows up with the air on and ate our lunch.. sandwiches and grapes.
Smelling all clean and back on the trail, maybe 20 miles in we saw a hand painted sight that said TAT riders sign in 3/4 mile. I had seen photos and knew the TAT Stop was somewhere in Arkansas but didn’t know exactly where. Met this wonderful old gentleman Percy who loved meeting all the people riding the trail, he told us 9 riders had stopped by yesterday but we were the first today. He takes photos of everyone and then every year all the photos are put into a book and printed, we’ll be in next years! His daughter stopped while we were there, she lived in upstate New York but was traveling through. She told us that this is what keeps him getting up every morning! Lovely folks!
Could have chatted all day but it was off down the trail, Ar-KANSAS is well named around here, long straight, flat roads with no curves anywhere. On a nice day it would have been hard to stay awake through here. Lucky us it had rained a lot recently so the gravel roads were just long mud puddles, more luck, it started to rain pretty hard again. That got a lot of mud off the Jeep but made the roads worse, or more fun depending how you looked at it
We could have gone down closer to Little Rock but that was too far off the trail so we spent another night at a Walmart in Beebe AR. As soon as we got to town we found a car wash and hosed the mud off the Jeep so we could get in and out. Then we went to the Beebe community park and made spaghetti, garlic bread, and some salad for dinner. Took everything out of the refrigerator and cleaned that out, somebody…hmmm… hadn’t tighted the top of the pickle jar and it was a bit pickley 🙂
We got smart this time and looked at the alcohol map for Arkansas before night-fall and saw that Beebe was in a dry county so we stopped early at a gas station and picked up some IPA’s I think are local!