Country Exploration

Stephen wanted to find a swimming hole Monday night, so we went on a little adventure to find one. He google mapped it and it looked navigational, so we gave it a shot. I should call this a misadventure because we never found a suitable swimming hole, but we did have some fun driving around in the middle of nowhere and seeing random critters.

The swimming hole that we were trying to find was in Conway, but it was down a muddy dirt road, past HUGE cornfields. I don´t think we were technically in city limits anymore. The only signs I saw were speed limit signs with shot gun holes through them. It was comforting.

We start off driving down a paved road which randomly turns into a dirt and gravel road alongside a barbed wire fence. It was funny how quickly the scenery changed. Stephen is driving and trying to eat at the same time, while I´m looking out the window trying to resist the temptation to toss his food out the window so he´ll pay attention. This is what I see:

Yeah, random peacock. So I yell, ¨There´s a peacock!¨ Stephen starts looking around for it wildly, all the while continuing to drive and eat. *Sigh*

We pull over to take pictures and show Sam. He likes it, but seems more interested in watching Stephen chase it through a field with the video camera. We were thoroughly entertained.

Back in the car and not much further up the road there are tons of cows. They´re standing along the fence, so we stop again and take Sam out to look at them. Sam starts pointing and talking to them. Stephen starts mooing at them. Sam stops watching the cows to watch Stephen. I do, too. Again, we are entertained.

Stephen suggests that I drive, so he could hold Sam. (Yeah, get over it, we were in the middle of freakin nowhere. I don´t think a head-on collision with corn would have done much damage). We drive waaaaaayyyy up this dirt road which starts to have deep tire tracks in them; we´re in the Civic btw. Stephen starts instructing me on how to drive and I appease him by following directions...I wouldn´t be the one pushing the car out of the mud if we got stuck. This is the obstacle that I overcame with my mad driving skills:

Stephen and Sam got out to ¨direct¨ me over the obstacle pictured above. Afterwards I´m waiting for them to get back in the car, but Stephen decides it´d be better to tell Sam about life on a corn farm. I´m not kidding and I´m kicking myself now for not getting this on video.

This little dude ran across the road. He was tiny! Something we didn´t get pictures of were the enormous rats that were in the road too. They ran away before we could get close. Stephen called them river rats which was appropriate since we were looking for a river, I guess.

We were having trouble finding the swimming hole, so we turned down a random road (all of these roads were random) just in case. We found some pretty bluffs, saw some deer, and got a great picture. What is cool about this picture is right before we took it three deer jumped one after the other over a fence way back there. It would´ve been a cool video, but we didn´t anticipate that to happen so oh well.
We drove a little longer down that road and decided to turn back. We passed two guys hanging out on the side of the road...with shotguns. When we drove back by them one of them fired the freakin gun. Not at us, thankfully, but it was still creepy. We found a paved road to get home on and headed back.