Mammoth Goes To Missouri

 Monday, October 18 2021

Home to Ed's Mother's RV Site
Planned drive time: 5:40
Actual: 5:37

Headed out to our own private RV park in Arkansas. We made exceptionally good time--in fact, the trip went so fast I began to believe that old age had crept up on my sense of time passing and sped it up into infinity. But it really was a fast trip.

We didn't take the pig trail, of course, in the Mammoth Motorhome. The pig trail is what the natives call Highway 23 going north from I-40 through the Ozark mountains. It's the shortest route to Ed's Mom's house, and we've take it innumerable times over the years. But it has two sections of "very crooked and steep" which include 20 mile-per-hour turns going downhill and uphill at excessive degrees of inclination. And there are two complete 180-degree turns at 10 miles per hour.

If you're not in a hurry, it's not all that bad, but it's not what you want to be doing in a 32-foot motorhome with a jeep on the tow bar. So we chose a route that took us up I-49 to the southern edge of Fayetteville; then back "down" to the southeast on Highway 16. So instead of going northeast, then north, we went north, then southeast. And it didn't take all that much longer.

The spot that Ed and Bill cleared back during the summer has been leveled and graveled. The turn-in was widened and they graveled a loop to make it a pull-through site. Excellent. When we were parked and leveled, only one wheel was off the ground.

  Out the front windshield:

No fall colors yet, but there was a bit of nip in the air. Very pleasant drive.

They eat "supper" in the mid-afternoon there, so we didn't have to eat our dinner meal with them. After we got settled in we went up to the house and ate their leftover chicken and rice. They don't seem to believe in vegetables, but Ed scrounged a can of ranch-style beans and I had my store-bought salad and instant noodles with stir-fried vegetables. Excellent.

And that was about all for the day. Molly got a nice walk up and down the "logging road", which is where they built the RV site. Ed's Mom's house is halfway up a big hill (you can call it a mountain, if you want to, but I wouldn't However it is a very big hill). But she owns the property all the way down the hill to an old road they used to take to cut lumber for fireplaces. On the other side of the road is a creek.

I should have taken my game cam. If not at the site itself, I could definitely have hooked it on a tree pointing toward the road and creek. Might have caught a bear.