I Am A Complete Idiot!

 OK, maybe not a complete idiot.

True, I am a man, and we all know man-brains can sometimes be - well, pretty idiotic. But on the plus side, as a kid I was often told I only had half a brain. So I guess that makes me a half idiot!

Anyway - this particular incident started out innocent enough, if a little unexpected. Then things went caddywampus in a hurry!

Within days of getting home from the family reunion the Wife got a feeling that she really needed to go see her Missouri based sisters. Which was pretty noteworthy since this would be the first time in nearly 20 years that she went anywhere more than a couple-three hours away from the property.

In a moment of stupidity, or was it idiocy?, I offered to, with barely a pause, turn right around from the last trip and drive her back up to near where I just was.

She quickly pointed out, in that all too familiar 'don't be an idiot' tone, that I needed to stay here and once a day toss some food out for the two cats that still hang around the property and water the toad that's living in the barn. (Can't put a stash of food out for the cats to live on because all the other critters swoop in and clean it up within hours.)

 Whew! Dodged a bullet there!

So that lead to me teaching her how to use Google Maps to plot her route, find hotels, and most importantly, locate restaurants. (I think I've said before that she's a food oriented person.)

Well, the Wife is not particularly tech-savvy so it was tough going, involving much repetition and taking lots of notes because she's not any better at remembering tech-stuff than she is at doing it. On top of that she has zombie-fingers so working with the phone can be chalanging. So, to steal a line from Harry Chapin's Taxi, 'the lesson hadn't gone too far'.

Frustrated and completely loosing confidence in her ability to make the drive on her own, not to mention the crippling anxiety she was already putting herself through just thinking about wandering unfamiliar roads on her own, she reached out to the Daughter (her stepdaughter), who runs her own pet-care business in Tucson. Offering to pay her way to and from Texas to spend a week visiting with her mom, siblings, and niece/nephew, as well as rent her a car and pay double her going rate to have the Daughter make the 4 hour round trip from family home to the property daily to kibble the cats and water the toad.

The Daughter could do it, but was already booked up until early October. Well, the trip to see the sisters was too urgent to wait that long (Hey, I've learned that when the Wife gets these feelings the best thing to do is just get out of the way!), which is what lead to discovering that there's a Rover living only a few miles away that was willing to come over once a day and refill the plates

and even water the toad. 

BTW, if you knew the Wife you'd realize just how important this trip must be if she's willing to let a stranger on the property!

So that’s how my idiocy came right back and bit me on the ass in the form of setting out at dawn one morning with the Wife in the passenger seat as I basicly retraced my route of a few days ago back up Texas, across Arkansas, and, by noon the next day, to a destination in Missouri.

The Wife is food oriented and it used to be, decades ago when we still did stuff like this, travel with the Wife wasn't about going from here to there, it was about going from restaurant to restaurant until we eventually got there. - It still is - Only now it's all take-away since she hasn't been able to tolerate sitting in a restaurant among people since about 2020. (We're  a good match in that way.)

I got her as far as a hotel in St. Charles, just west of St. Louis, where her sister from Columbia was going to pick her up the next morning, collect the other sister that lives near St. Charles, and head back to Columbia in the middle of the state for a few days.

It was a little after noon on a Friday when, after several trips, we got the Wife’s stuff shlepped up to her room (Crap! There was a lot of stuff!). Without even closing the door behind us the Wife tossed the last bag on the rented bed, turned around, and told me to go away and come back Tuesday to pick her up.  To be fair, she said this with gratitude and in a loving way as she shoved me back out into the hall and shut the door in my face.

Which is how I ended up, an additional three hours of driving later (the Ranger is 18 months old and already has 30k miles on it!), right back at the Lake Glenwood National Forest campground I had stayed at barely a week before. Different campsite this time, but one I've used before.

(Not sure this video of my firepit-in-a-box will work)

I did some other stuff while I was waiting for Tuesday to roll around, which I'll get to in another post, but on Sunday I transfered the bike rack from trailer to Ranger

and drove over to the tiny little village of New Burnside where there's an access point on the Tunnel Hill State Trail.

You might remember that this is where I turned around on a ride up from Viena along the trail a week or so ago.

My plan was, as is befitting for a person of my - um, accumulated wisdom, to take a leisurely ride on this, virgin to me, northern section of the trail up as far as Carrier Mills and back. A 20+ mile trip.

Just a mile north of New Burnside, tucked into the woods, sits this unexpected little trailside oasis accessible only from the trail.

The little village of Stonefort, named for a nearby stone defensive wall built some 1500 years ago, turned up right where it was supposed to be.

What was unexpected and  pleasantly surprising was the well preserved combo freight and passenger station from the railroad days still standing there.

If you sit and listen long enough, you can hear the faint echos of waiting passengers chatting, the crunch of steel-rimed wagon-wheels on gravel and the clank of the beam-scale as teamsters arrive to drop off goods to be shipped by the railroad, the barely perceptible tapping of the telegraph key at the station master's desk, the creak & squeal of the semaphor signal mechanism as the 'clear' aspect is changed to 'stop' -

Ah-hem! Oops! Kinda got lost there for a moment.

Back to the present - Each trail access point has bike-racks, a water-point, a picnic table or two and pit toilets. So let's top up the water bottle and use the toilet before getting back on the trail again.

Ok, so New Burnside, my start point today, seemed like a nice little village as I got the bike down off the rack and readied it. A few cars coasting down the narrow streets, a teenage couple walking by to stop at the swingset, swing for a while, then head back the way they came, a handfull of dogs running over to bark at me, backing down when I ignored them.

And maybe I was bribed by the presence of the station, but Stonefort seemed a pleasent, if quite, place.

But my next stop, and intended turnaround point, Carrier Mills, had a different kinda vibe.

Maybe because the State supplied watering point and pit toilets at the trail access point were, according to the tattered sign, turned off and locked up due to vandalism, although none was visible. Maybe because I never saw another person, or even moving car, while I was there. But that was not a town that invited me to linger! I didn't even snap a quick photo.

OK, here's where the idiocy really kicked in. After being thwarted by the dry water spigot, locked bathroom doors and the 'deliverance' sort of vibe of Carrier Mills, instead of the packed lunch I had planned on kicking back and eating there before heading back to the Ranger, I checked my map of the trail, squinting at my tiny screen in the bright sunlight, and thought,

'You know what!? I've been to the southern end of this 45 mile long trail a couple of times now, and from here the northern end, at Harrisburg, is just up the way. As long as I'm here I should just go ahead and knock that off too.'

- - - Yep, definitly a 'here, hold my beer.' kinda moment - - -  (que a hearty rendition of the Dennis Steven Wright song 'You're a Dumbass')

Seven and a half miles later, a fact I somehow managed to ignore when making the ill-conceived decision to ride on - but not as I was actually riding it - I gasped and wobbled my way into Henderson.

On top of everything else, the nicely shaded trailside bench on the south side of town, perfect for a half-dead old man who still thinks he's 33, was occupied when I creaked and huffed on by it.

The arrow is pointing at the trail.

Harrisburg is a good sized town of about 8000, much larger than the other stops along the trail, with a Walmart across the way and a whole string of businesses squeezed in between the trail and the main road.

I managed to avoid the temptation of the Dairy Queen and didn't quite need the Urgent Care facility, though it was good to know it was there.

There used to be a long siding here at Harrisburg. Because the city wanted more space for tax-generating businesses between the trail and the road, at least that’s my assumption, south of town there's a sudden jog in the trail as it switches, over the course of a road crossing, from what used to be the main line over to the siding which is a little farther from the highway.

Well into town, past the Dairy Queen but almost still within sight of it, I finally found an unocupied, shaded bench where I belatedly partook of my delayed lunch while trying not to slide off my seat and congeal on the ground like overcooked spaghetti.

Lunch even came with entertaimnent!

Just 20 yards away, tucked up under a tree, a guy was on his feet and head-first into the depths of a large yellow drybag, the kind you see on rafting trips. At first I thought he was just vigorously repacking his bag as he repeatedly attacked the contents with pistoning arms, but I don't care how big it is, it doesn't take that long to squash the contents down into a drybag.

My suspicions that this was not 'main stream' behavior were confirmed when he suddenly pulled a Freddy style goalie mask out of his abused yellow bag and put it on. Whenever someone went by on the trail he would lift his head up out of the bag and stare at them before diving back in. It was funny to watch some of the startled passerby's reactions!

On the map, the trail between New Burnside and Harrisburg appears to be right alongside the highway the whole way. And it is. But not the way you might think.

There's a nice, tree-lined buffer between the trail and the highway, so it's not like you're riding down the shoulder of a state highway. In fact it's actually quite a pleasant ride.

Well, it would have been if I hadn't bit off so much of a ride all in one mouthful.

You know how, when you're about to run out of gas and you start driving faster so you get there sooner even though that's the worst thing you can do vis-a-vis fuel conservation?

Yep, that’s me.

After lunch I reset Gaia to zero and headed back towards the Ranger which was eighteen and a quarter miles away and over 400 feet higher. And somehow I managed to do it in just two and a half hours!

Alright! Alright! I'll concede that, now that I've got the bike back on the rack and the Ranger pointed back towards camp, I just may be a complete idiot! -

Now, if only I could get Dennis Wright to stop singing in my head - -