Saturday (Aug 6)
Big, long downpour around dawn. It rained hard for quite a while. I woke up enough to notice how odd the light was at sunrise, and sure enough it rained really long and hard soon after. Tent folks got pretty well flooded. But they were going to be up and at ’em by 7:30 anyway to make the most of their daily fishing passes, so no big deal to them!
While noodling on my laptop in the rain I discovered that the park wifi is back(!) and powerful enough to actually use from inside my van at my site. So now I am the pure picture of contentment, cozy on my bed listing to the rain pound on the van and doing my daily wifi – life is great!
I figure breakfast at the lodge is as good as I’m gonna get in this part of the world, so I drive up there one more time on my way out of the park. The wifi is still terrible up here but unlike yesterday I don’t care, because I already got mine!
I leave Roaring River out the other side of the valley, on the road past my campground heading southwest. Within ten minutes I am in Arkansas. In another hour I’ll be in Oklahoma. For that short span of time when I was cruising a little chunk of the northwest corner of Arkansas everyone is wearing red and have angry pigs (The Razorbacks!) all over their trucks. Then I cross into Oklahoma and we stick with the red theme, but the angry pigs are magically all gone! US 62 takes me past Bentonville, which you may or may not know as the World Headquarters and Where It All Started for Walmart. The whole town fairly glows with success and affluence. Considering all that wealth comes from sucking the life out of other small towns all across America, I am not diggin’ it.
Not sure what to make of this, but neither the Missouri-Arkansas border or the Arkansas-Oklahoma border was marked with the usual “Welcome” sign. No big deal to me, my degree of welcome-feeling is unchanged … for better or worse.
My park is a pretty short drive and I don’t really feel like stopping yet. I could keep going, but it is Saturday night and the place I’d planned on sounds kinda cool, so I’ll stick to my plan, but decide to invest a little time in stopping for a Frostie at Wendy’s. Women’s volleyball was on the tv – I’d forgotten that the Olympics started while I was in the backwoods!
WHUFU page for: Natural Falls Campground
The park is pretty cool.
It's an easy walk from the campground to the little waterfall, and the boardwalk makes some quite dramatic bridges over the chasm. Yes there is a chasm!
Oklahoma State Parks did a very nice job with this.
And across the chasm is a frisbee golf course!
tonight:
The park is pretty cool.
It's an easy walk from the campground to the little waterfall, and the boardwalk makes some quite dramatic bridges over the chasm. Yes there is a chasm!
Oklahoma State Parks did a very nice job with this.
And across the chasm is a frisbee golf course!
Odd little state park, you can hear and even see US 412 a couple hundred yards away across a level, mowed field. It does not have what I have come to expect as the “State Park feel” to it. But it does have available sites on Saturday night! It seems flat and featureless, but there is apparently a waterfall 500 yards away.
The check-in woman had perfect penmanship! Such a delightful thing to watch the perfectly shaped parts of my address come flowing from her hand movement!
I am early enough to chill in the hammock awhile (“chill” is an optimistic word in the afternoon heat), and still have time for and extended walk to see what this alleged waterfall is all about. Turned out to be pretty cool!
It’s a genuine chasm! We are still in limestone country, still on the Ozark Plateau, so it’s probably a giant sinkhole. They’ve laid out the walkways very nicely. When you enter the forest and first come to the chasm’s edge there is a cantilevered viewing platform to look down at the little waterfall and its grotto. Then there’s a little zig-zag path to get to the bottom and the grotto-level viewing area. There’s a longer hike that follows the creek downstream to the back of the main campground, but I take the path back up to the top and continue onward to a bridge over the chasm to the far side of the park. It would’ve been pretty boring except they put a frisbee golf course over there! I didn’t bring my frisbee, but I followed the mowed fairways for a nice evening stroll. The frisbee golf course gives a good explanation for the bro-tastic quality of some of my fellow campers in the tent area.
I am doing my best to enjoy life back at the campground. Site 6 is on the edge and I am parked facing away, which gives me decent privacy once I’m inside the van. But hanging out outside after dark is pretty sucky because this group of 8-12 twenty-somethings about 30 degrees around the loop seems to need the headlights of one of their six cars every few minutes for some stupid thing or another. I think the ladies are driving to the bathroom and back (about 150 open, level yards). The little red car with a bad muffler is my (least) favorite. Starts and goes somewhere every half hour or so. Living the Van Life on the road on Saturday nights almost always sucks.
Sunday
This morning is just as hot and humid as every other day around here. I think the flies are a little worse. Both the big parties of noisy assholes have left, leaving a few of us stragglers on the outer edge in a pleasant Sunday morning torpor. To my left, a kind of country-punk dad and his daughter camping out of their 70’s vintage Plymouth or Dodge. To my right a city-type dad and his two young sons and their modern SUV. I’m guessing a couple of Dad shared-custody visitation weekends. Happy to say things seem to be going well enough for both of them … bless them and good luck to them all.
I know I will be in the mountains in a week or so and the blessed coolness that will come with that is starting to loom in my mind. I check Wunderground (my weather app) to see where on the map the angry red temperature color starts shading into cooler oranges, and it seems to be over at the far end of Oklahoma. That’s at least three days away. I can’t wait … although of course I will.
The first few miles today are along the supposedly scenic Illinois River. It is seems to be a recreation mecca. The socialist dictators from Washington DC have paid for a lot of cleanup, and habitat/watershed restoration so the government-hatin locals can recreate, so it’s hopping on a Sunday in August. I’m sure the Trumpican person that runs the kayak rentals believes “he built that”, not that he has a business because the federals came and used my tax dollars to clean up his river for him.
The entire scenic byway was no big whoop scenery-wise in my opinion, just a curvy road with no passing lanes and a rare glimpse of the river off to the left. This area seems to be not for me, rather for the giant pickups that suddenly appear two feet from my bumper – not feeling it around here.
There were two promising coffee places in the town of Tahlequah, but … closed on Sunday. So I end up eating at a pretty awful chain breakfast place. Good air conditioning though…
The rest of the day was boring two lane roads as I right-angle my way across this part of central Oklahoma to the state park where I hope to camp. By the time I get to the town of Okmulgee I am hot and tired so I stop at the local DQ for a frostie, my new thing here in the midwest. Thus fortified I drive the last few miles to the Okmulgee Lake State Recreation Area to search for the campsite of my dreams.
WHUFU page for: Red Oak Campground
Most of their tent sites are truly for tents, but there's a little group of three new no-hookup sites that are really nice. Up on the hill, fairly level, private. I chose the one away from the folks playing loud country music.
It's a short walk down the hill to the swimming beach, which was incredibly refreshing on this muggy day. Bathroom and shower are close but not too close.
tonight:
Most of their tent sites are truly for tents, but there's a little group of three new no-hookup sites that are really nice. Up on the hill, fairly level, private. I chose the one away from the folks playing loud country music.
It's a short walk down the hill to the swimming beach, which was incredibly refreshing on this muggy day. Bathroom and shower are close but not too close.
The big feature here is the swimming beach, a coupla hundred yards down the hill to the left. By the time I was ready to go (almost sunset of course) everyone else had left so I have it to myself! It’s very, very pleasant and refreshing. I explore the scenic little point of land to the right of the beach and discover an amazing CCC pavilion around the corner. It’s abandoned and unused and horribly disrespected by graffiti and trash. Kinda depressing …