Road Trip Day 25 - 2007-08-13

Here's a map of my route for today, 896 miles!
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&hl=en&geocode=&saddr=Gallup,+NM&daddr=Fayetteville,+AR&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=54.22533,82.617188&ie=UTF8&z=6&om=1

Check out the picture I took today:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10306971@N03/sets/72157601484548957/

Today I hit the road at around 8:30 mountain time. I got a decent night of sleep, though the stupid train blowing its horn every few hours kept waking me up. Also, I only got about 7 hours, so I wasn't quite feeling fully rested.

Again, not too much to say about today: I was on the road for most of the day heading to Devil's Den State Park in Arkansas to meet up with Justin and his family. For lunch I stopped at a Mexican restaurant in the same town I stopped at Home Run Pizza on the way out. I got some tacos which were pretty mediocre: the shells were stale and the meat didn't have much flavor. I honestly think that Taco Bell would have been tastier. That's the thing with local places, they can be pretty hit-or-miss.

I continued driving on into Texas and Oklahoma, which was pretty slow going. I stopped at McDonald's for a quick bite since I was eager to get where I was going. My current ETA was around 12:30, and I didn't want to make it much later than that.

When I finally got to approach Devil's Den Park in Arkansas, the road turned into a dirt road and I still had about 10 miles to go. That wasn't a lot of fun: I was getting jostled all over the place and wasn't entirely sure where I was supposed to go. Fortunately, the GPS was able to get me to the park, but I had no idea where the cabin Justin was renting could be. I drove all around the park looking for it, but didn't have much luck. Eventually, I found the information center which had a free map available. This helped me find the place for an arrival time of 12:50 CST. That was quite a long drive!

After I got there, I had a few drinks with Justin and his brother Joe. Like Justin, Joe is very interested in people's motivations for their career paths. We had quite a lively discussion about the merits of what it was that I decided to do with my life, which was pretty interesting. After that, we watched a few South Park episodes and headed to bed at 4:00am.