From Branson Mo To Fayetteville, Arkansas you have a multitude of different routes to choose from. Your choice depends upon your personal tolerance of winding roads and possible delays. The back highways of any hilly region are necessarily winding and can be quite remote. My chosen route to Fayetteville was over those thin, winding ribbons of asphalt that take digression seriously when joining point A to point B. Winding back roads can be dangerous and on this day they were the undoing of one person driving ahead of me. I came upon a queue of cars that wound around the bend a head and showed up still in place as the road wound around and over a hill in view further ahead. The folks in line were in no rush. Many of them were sitting on the hoods of their cars or on the tailgates of their truck. It was a lovely day for an extended visit and the accident ahead was as good an excuse as any to sit in the sun and shoot the breeze. Most seemed non-plussed by the tragedy ahead. The person was dead (the grapevine told) and the proper authorities has been contacted additional fussing is for the people in front of the line.

I happen to be one of those drivers that, when I am in the driving part of a trip I prefer to be moving… in any direction. The destination is still at the end of the road and an extra 15 or 20 miles or road is an extra 15 or 20 miles of scenery. The road, already digressive had now completely changed the subject and for me to follow the conversation I would need to turn around and find a different route.

The new route took me to a town called Huntsville, Arkansas, "Crossroads of the Ozarks." In Huntsville there is a place called Grandma's Kitchen. I stopped for some pie. Grandma's kitchen looked a likely place for a slice, what Grandma didn't make pie? Grandma's had fried dough bread as one of it's featured special treats. Fired dough bread is a country-eatin' standard. Take a ball of your raw bread dough and stretch it like a pizza crust and drop it into your hot oil. Let it cook until it is golden and you have one genuine delicious treat. Grandma says it's perfect with powdered sugar, jam & jelly or just hot with fresh butter melting on it. Just the thing for what ails ya.

But I was there for the pie. They had coconut pie, pecan pie and banana cream pie, but my eye was taken by the blackberry cobbler. This cobbler was close enough to pie to pass my muster: Crust on top? Check. Crust on the bottom? Check. Delicious blackberry stuff twixt the twain? Check. "One piece of cobbler, please." The coffee was expectedly thin, but a good piece of blackberry cobbler will make up for weak coffee any day, maybe even twice. But Fayetteville was still somewhere ahead, so I tipped my hat to the purple smear on the plate, left a tip for the waitress and hit the road. Ah, life is good when you have pie.

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For many people Friday night and the phrase "complete abandonment" means excitement and wild activity. Along the main drag of Stuttgart it means the opposite. Absence of life, stillness and solitude; storefronts closed and shuttered; not a neon sign to be seen. It was main drag in all ways. My phone yodeled at me as I walked, it was my brother.

"Hey, I'm going to be in New Orleans for a volleyball tournament next week. Come on down, we can spend some time together."

It was a good enough excuse for me. I hadn't seen my brother for a few years and New Orleans was only four-hundred-something miles away—the closest we have been for a while. Though my intent was to mosey North, out of the heat, any other place sounded better than Stuttgart at the moment. The next morning I waived farewell to the rice paddies and headed south.

I broke all protocol on the drive: I drove straight through (8.5 hours) at speeds over 55 miles per hour and between Baton Rouge and New Orleans I even drove on an interstate! *Gasp!* But along the way I stopped for a few snapshots. On an isolated stretch of highway 165 between Dewitt and Gillett, Arkansas, you will pass Charlie's Service. Charlie built a man out of tires. It stands something over twenty-feet tall. Wave back as you pass.

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When you leave Fayetteville you have a choice once again. I was heading south and had the choice of the interstate 540 or the winding and slightly longer highway 71. It wasn't a tough decision. I chose to wind.

If you keep your eyes open as you drive around the country you will often find smaller highways that connect two destinations that are roughly parallel to the interstates. These are the old highways that were the arteries of the of the country. Before the interstates were built, everything that didn't travel by rail went over these roads. Route 66 isn't the only place to drive to find the experience of driving through the past, it just happened to have a song written about it. Like Route 66, the feeder highways are dotted with tiny burghs and punctuated with derelict remembrances to past prosperity. Gas station/diners with curved walls of glass brick, architectural novelties calling to the passing traveler:

"Stop, stop, pull over your car
  there's food and fuel and rest.
Pull over your car, come stop a while,
   our pie's the very best."

For many of these, the pie is there no longer. The people who lived and prospered under their rafters are gone; taken away by the interstates; and the new tenants have no concern for leaky roofs, broken windows and rotting floorboards. Agents of nature claiming eminent domain, they fly past the shattered glass and creep in under the foundation making their homes in the detritus of yesterdays glory. The ultimate victory of the cockroach expressed upwards through the tree of life.

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One of the problems with bonking about in Smalltown is that eventually you will need something that is not available in the local Walmart nor in the businesses that managed to survive the economic scouring that a new Walmart tends to give a community. I came upon such a moment when one of my external hard drives took a data dump to that big supercomputer in the sky. Fortunately, I practice data-redundancy but that still left me with a the knowledge that if something happens to the remaining drive, I'm in deep doo doo…. Hence it was time for a day trip to Little Rock, Arkansas.

Zoom, zoom. My laundry-bag in tow I zipped past the rice fields until they turned to corn and the corn to the outskirts of an urban area. Paved crossroads, traffic lights… exciting things like that.

Little Rock Arkansas is a nice, small mid-western capitol city. At the President Clinton Museum gift shop you can buy sunglasses and find out what the ex-pres has on his iPod. Hmmm was that a subtle product placement by apple?

It's hot there in the Spring, hotter in the Summer. Go down to the river where there are nice restaurants and shops with air conditioning. My recommendation is to go to Flying Saucer Draught Emporium ( 323 President Clinton Ave, Little Rock, AR 72201). They have seven thousand beers from around the world on tap and twice that in bottles. If you are lucky you will get to chat with the owner who can be seen srolling about, beer in hand chatting to his buddies, making sure everyone has what they need. It is a lively atmosphere with good food and lots of beer.

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So there I was, right outside of Hot Springs Village, Arkansas. The map showed the Lake Ouachita State Park campground was a blip over to the left but it showed no roads between. Sure I saw a sign by the side of the road a ways back, but the sign was pointing out more than which way to turn, it was pointing out that I needed a better map.

A good map will get you a long way in life. A good map will show you not only how to get from A to B it will also show you all of the different ways to get there. Options of discovery. I used to like just go out driving, seeing how far I could get lost and then find my way back again. I still do enjoy that now and then. But I now find that when using a good map, I can study it before hand and see something that might look interesting, a slight twist from where I might have randomly missed it. I can make that my point B or point C and wend my way toward that. A good map is a treasure map, only you get to decide what the treasure will be.

Let's be honest here. We are diving automobiles/motorcycles/bicycles/scateboards/etc. on roads. This is not the unexplored plains. The only discovery going on is personal. Not only has somebody been there before us, a crew of people built the road and there are probably folk living where we're headed. Take advantage of the situation and use a good map.

But what do I mean by a good map? There are the wonderful topographical maps from the USGS, but with those you might need to pull out a new 17" x 22" map every five miles. It's wonderful stuff, but a bit too much detail for a driving trip. Of course there are the standard folding maps. Every gas station has them. If you are goind to do any amount of exploring in a metro area, a good city-specific folding map can be a godsend. But for state-wide meandering they can still be a bit fuzzy, not to mention difficult to work with with all of those accordion folds. My favorite paper maps are the state-specific maps put out by Delorme Maps. These maps are wonderful! They are topographical so you can see what the terrain is like. They give you an idea whether you are going to be driving through swamps or forests or open land. And they show ALL of the roads. Even the nasty rutted ones you would never consider driving… well you might think twice first. But most importantly you will be able to find all of the lovely side routs that only the locals know of—and now you! They are in an atlas format. It often takes 60 pages or more to cover a state, but once you get used to them you wouldn't want to be without one. They are not cheap, $12 to $20 per (depending on where you buy them) but well worth it.

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Let's just say you have been spending the last few days by a gigantic Ozark Lake. It is lovely there, you've been sunning, swimming and hiking. You might decide that you've had enough of that and it's time to move on. But where, where, where would you go? The woods of the Arkansas Ozarks are calling you to just lay back and rest a while, a little bit more, the same way the Appalachian Mountains called to Rip van Winkle to close his eyes and take a nap. But you resist. There are more things to see further along the road and they are calling to you too. Pack up the car, roll down the windows and begin the parade anew.

I too felt the beckoning and though the air and the water suited me fine it was time to move on and see more. I placed Lake Ouachita and the village of Mountain Valley in my rear view mirror and headed forward. East again, winding the back roads of the Arkansas Ozarks to new adventures ahead. The good map showed me a plethora of alternative routes along my way and I drove some of the thinnest lines on the map to enter into the city of Hot Springs, Arkansas from a point so strange that I was surprise to find myself so suddenly in a developed place. One moment I was on a tiny road surrounded by green and the next bend found me on a street with storied buildings on either side. When the buildings continued around the next bend I realized that I was in more than just a miniscule crossroads town. I was in Hot Springs.

The tourist must love Hot Springs, Arkansas because Hot Springs, Arkansas clearly loves them. The town has been attracting visitors from all over for more than a hundred years and has gotten good at it. Filled with cafes, hotels and places to shop the stage themselves as a Mecca for people looking for the quaint and lovely ambiance this historic vacation spot has to offer. Hot Springs, Arkansas is well worth a google if you want to read more about them. I won't repeat all of that here.

My particular agenda isn't about the tourist thing. I was back in civilization again. The thing to do was to grab my email and move on. I found a wireless hot spot across from one of the municipal buildings. (Madeline's G-Spot was the name of the WAP I never figured out who Madeline was) There was four days worth of spam queued up for me, o-boy. With my Email current, I headed across the state. I had targeted a state camping ground on the eastern edge of Arkansas, it would be about a 200 mile drive.

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Imagine yourself amongst the rice fields. Wide, open spaces, precisely leveled and flattened with an Ausburgian attention to detail. The carefully planted rice is short, looking like a bad hair transplant. You can see for miles and for miles all you can see is more rice paddies. The temperature is ninety-plus, humidity to match. The monotony of the scenery conspires with the oppressive heat, numbing you, washing your mind clean of thought. You see the horizon wrinkle, smooth linearity broken as structure emerges from the earth into the muggy sky; the air, dense with vapor, paints it indistinct and smeared on the canvas of the skyline.

You are now a peasant in the 1500's. Shod in ill-fitting wraps that are the shoes of the day, you walk the barren plains. Trees dot the horizon. You approach the city step by step. Drawing your gaze, the cathedral spires penetrate the sphere of the sky, growing imperceptibly. As you near the city gates the cathedral has grown to dominate the hovels of the surrounding city as it dominates your attention. An impossibly gargantuan bulk, you shake your head at the wonders that humankind can create.

And as you shake your head, the embroidery of your imagination unravels revealing the massive silos and grain driers that support one of the largest rice growing regions of the country. Welcome to Stuttgart, Arkansas, self-proclaimed Rice and Duck Capital of the World. The seeming desolation of the surrounding lands is imaginary as well. The dust-devils dancing across the fields declare only the obvious: it is hot and the rice has not fully grown in.

Emblazoned in 300 foot letters on the side of the largest of the silo complexes is the word RICELAND. Appropriate. The Riceland cooperative is the biggest rice miller in the world and Stuttgart, AR is where Riceland has it's headquarters.

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