Road Trip: Tennessee to Colorado, Part 1

After a good night's sleep in our rundown motel, we set off early into Arkansas (after a brief diversion to a post office; I sent over 50 postcards from my trip in total) and headed for Little Rock. We had originally thought about stopping there for the night, but it was only 145 miles from Memphis to Little Rock, and we had some days coming up which had some serious mileage attached, so in the end we decided to spend the afternoon in Little Rock before moving on.

Little Rock was a lovely city, and we only saw a tiny part of it. The attraction for the day was the William J. Clinton Presidential Library, which was an amazing archive describing all of the great things that he did while in office. Dave and I mused on this afterwards, that President Obama is touted as being a great man and someone who will get things done, but somewhere in that I think people are forgetting just how much Bill Clinton did while in office. We had lunch in a lovely food court nearby, and I picked up a souvenir Air Force One tshirt from the library gift shop, and then we set off again, eventually settling in Russellville for the night at a Budget Inn. Very basic, pretty cheap but it did the job.

Like many places that we visited along the way, Russellville was like one big street near the interstate with lots of shops and fast food places. There was a Walmart, and we went once again to have a look around the cookie-cutter shopping experience; dinner was our first taste of Taco Bell, which can't be good for you, but was just too tasty not to repeat later on in the trip (cheesy potato and bacon burrito with tacos, yum!).

The next day we set off again, detouring from our original itinerary to head north via Oklahoma City instead of Tulsa; there wasn't anything in particular we had been looking to see in Tulsa, and once again by detouring we were getting ahead of ourselves so that the mileage in days to come would not be so severe. We stopped at an honest-to-goodness independent business for lunch that day, Robertsons Ham Sandwiches, which was delicious, two pieces of bread with a big wedge of thin-sliced ham inbetween. Dave's sandwich was even bigger, even more meat! A lovely place, run by two older ladies, and sadly, as we drove off, I couldn't help but think that in a few years it would be gone, replaced by a Subway when the ladies could no longer manage running it.

We stopped for the night in a regular motel, nothing special, nothing terrible, but the laundry room was busy, and I had to really search my case to find clean clothes for the following day. Things were getting desperate... But not me and Dave, we had settled into the routine of travelling quite well after a week on the road, and were keen all the time to keep pressing on. We were looking forward to reaching Colorado and enjoying the road inbetween, but at the same time we were also quite conscious that Las Vegas was the destination that we were both looking forward to most, both eager to reach. Dave had booked a round of golf at Fort Collins, and I was really happy to spend a day exploring there - but first we had to cross Kansas...

TO BE CONTINUED