I found myself out of a job in early November when the company I had worked for for five years closed their Austin office.  Through a twist of fate, I had managed to stumble bass ackwards into another job that began the second week of December.  So with my near-term job security ensured and a couple of weeks of time to kill, I decided to go on walkabout the day after Thanksgiving.  The plan was to spend a week hiking and generally gallivanting about in Arkansas, a place I had not visited since I was a child.  I had hoped to spend some time in the Ouachita National Forest and the Buffalo National River area and perhaps drive around through Tennessee on the way home.  But the weather had other plans.

I took off from East Texas on Saturday morning, making a brief stop at the border to get some free maps.  I followed U.S. 71 north from Texarkana and turned east on Highway 27, winding my way through the rolling pine forests of the southwestern corner of Arkansas to the town of Murfreesboro, my grandmother's childhood home.  I didn't stay long in Murfreesboro, for I knew that though there were countless stories buried just beneath the rustic surface of this sleepy piney woods town, I alone held no power to unlock them.  But I did stay long enough to check out the nearby Crater of Diamonds State Park.  The name is a little misleading-- the crater was buried eons ago, and essentially all that's left now is a field of dirt that visitors pay money to sift through in hopes of finding a diamond.  Kind of an odd state lottery, if you ask me.  (And insert your own joke about a lump of coal and Tom Delay here ...)  Continuing my quest for more mountainous terrain, I motored northeast toward Hot Springs, arriving there just after dark.

Hot Springs is both a city and a national park, and in fact it's the only national park to be entirely enclosed by a city.  As the city's name would imply, its turn-of-the-century bathhouses were built atop natural hot springs that emerge from the limestone hills along Highway 7 ("Bathhouse Row.")  Most of Sunday morning was spent exploring these bathhouses and their surrounding environs.  A slow meander down the row eventually led me to the Fordyce, a WWI-era bathhouse which has been completely restored and now serves as the national park's visitor's center.  Walking through the Fordyce gives one a sense of having traveled back in time, as each room is painstakingly crafted to look exactly as it did when the bathhouse was constructed in 1915.  After exploring almost every inch of the Fordyce, I took a hike up the hill to the Hot Springs Mountain Tower and paid the fee to ride the elevator to the top.  From the vantage point of the observation desk, I could see the iridescent hues of fall for miles around as the hardwoods had their last hurrahs before retreating into winter solitude.

It was around lunchtime, and I had seen about as much of Hot Springs as I needed to, so I jumped in the car and continued north on Hwy 7.  As I drove further north, the fall colors became less vibrant and the weather became more dreary and cold, but there was still enough of fall left over at Petit Jean State Park for me to get some decent photos.  Petit Jean, although not a very large park, has some spectacular panoramic mountain vistas, cascading creeks and waterfalls that make it worth the detour.  I could tell that I had missed the peak of the leaves by a few weeks, and the skies were a hazy shade of winter, but there was still a lingering beauty to be found among the last breath of fall.  I hiked just about every trail in the park and was back in my car inside of two hours.  Continuing north on Highway 7, I hit I-40 in less than another hour and sought food and lodging in the sleepy freeway town of Russellville.

The next morning, I awoke to a steady rain that had settled into the area and was blanketing all of the national forests I had planned to visit the next day.  I opted to continue north, hoping to drive out of the rain, but the rain and the fog only increased the further north I got.  The most scenic parts of the Ozarks were completely socked in, so I just kept driving, and before I knew it, I was in Branson, Missouri.  Branson was not very high on the original agenda-- certainly not a "must see" item-- but with the weather acting as it was, I figured it might be good for a few indoor laughs.  And I'd always wanted to see Ray Stevens live.  Well, Ray wasn't performing until the following night (Tuesday), and with no sign of the weather letting up, I resigned myself to making Branson my base of operations for the next two days while I waited for clearer skies.

A few words about Branson:  if you recall those CNN maps of the 2004 election, then you'll understand what I mean when I say that Branson is a crimson county in the middle of a red state.  Just as most performers in Austin would (correctly) assume a liberal (or at least somewhat progressive) bias in their audience, most entertainment in Branson seems to be tailored for born-again proselytizing Protestant Iraq-war-supporting Rush-listening gay-marriage-hating Chevy-Caprice-driving neo-Conservatives (with a capital C.)  Liberal media getting you down?  Take a pilgrimage to Branson, where $30 will get you in to hear any one of dozens of washed up country artists using their hour of fame to preach the Republican agenda to busloads of retirees from Iowa.  In short, I felt a bit outnumbered and out of place.

A brief walk around downtown Branson in the early afternoon drizzle didn't reveal very much of interest, then I stumbled upon the train depot, home of the Branson Scenic Railway.  Ah, now this looked to be a good way to kill a few soggy hours.  The Branson Scenic Railway, with its restored vintage diesel engine and dome cars, runs along an active freight track south of town and takes passengers up and over the pass into Arkansas and then back again.  It was definitely scenic, despite the misbehaving clouds.  After the few rainy hours were well and truly dead, I made my way out of downtown and crossed the freeway and into the "Branson strip", where the real "action" is.

A few words about the Branson strip:  if you were to take the Las Vegas strip, make it about 100 times smaller, subtract out all the naughty bits, booze and gambling, increase the average age of everyone on the street by 30, and book only musical acts that have had no airplay in at least 20 years, then you'd have something that very closely resembled Branson.  In short, the Branson strip is Moe Bandy, Mel Tillis, and lots of blinky lights.  That evening, still looking for innocuous ways to kill rainy hours, I somehow found myself in the ticket queue at the Jim Stafford Theater.  "Spiders and Snakes", right?  Well, I think he might have actually managed to squeeze in two of his hits somewhere in the middle of the on-stage prayer meetings and recitals by his 7-year-old daughter.  I'm sure the blue hairs in the audience ate it up, but I found myself wishing I'd seen Yakov Smirnoff instead.

Tuesday morning:  more fog and more rain.  Thumbing through the convenient travel brochures in the hotel lobby, I stumbled upon a flyer for a cavern tour north of Springfield.  Cavern.  Inside.  Inside good.  To the Batmobile!  Fantastic Caverns is a relic from a bygone era of family-owned roadside tourist attractions:  a cave that you can actually drive through.  Well, to be clear, you don't take your own car through it.  Rather, you pile into specially outfitted jeeps powered by clean-burnin' propane and propane accessories.  Fantastic Caverns is one of only four drive-through caves in the world (you mean three other people had the same idea?!) and the only one of its kind in North America.  And if you can get past the pure cheesiness of it all, it really is not a bad cave, as caves go.  And the drive up to the cavern took me through the Norman Rockwell-esque backroads north of Springfield, where I could see quaint little farmhouses nestled amongst the rolling hills, decked out for the holidays and battened down against the coming winter.  I could almost smell the apple pie baking, wafting across the fallen leaves in the crisp post-autumn air as the clouds tried to decide whether they really wanted to snow or rain today.

The weather was still on the dreary side as I returned to Branson in early afternoon.  The IMAX Theater looked like it might offer a few more cheap laughs.  My first choice would've been to see the film on Lewis and Clark, but the only one I could squeeze in before Ray was "Ozarks: Legacy and Legend."  "Ozarks" is an IMAX film shown solely in Branson, and after seeing the film, it's apparent why.  The film left me feeling as if I'd been driving with my right turn signal on for two hours.  But it did have a few crunchy historical nuggets mixed into the creamy conservative filling.

Ray Stevens' show was almost worth the whole 2-day detour, although he performed one song which brought me to a slow boil as it proclaimed that anyone who didn't support the Bush administration's policies in Iraq was an unpatriotic ingrate.  Fortunately, he followed it with "The Streak", so it was pretty easy to forgive and forget.  Ray had apparently only been back in the spotlight since June of 2004 after taking a ten-year hiatus, so it was a privilege to get to see him at all.  His new band includes fiddle virtuoso Nancy Henson, granddaughter of Claud Henson, the first inductee into the Texas Fiddle Hall of Fame.  As a musician (former country musician, even), I've heard a lot of fiddle players, but none quite like Nancy.  While I'm sure playing for Ray Stevens is good exposure for her, she really needs a show of her own.

Wednesday morning brought sunshine and bitter cold, the first sunny day I'd seen all week.  But the past three days had drained my resolve to continue the trip, and I had also realized that Wednesday was the day when my insurance ran out from my previous job.  Since the insurance from the new job didn't kick in until the following Monday, I figured it wise to pack it in and motor southwest toward bluer counties.  It had taken me a couple of days to meander as far north as Branson, but after jumping on the Interstate, I was back in Austin inside of 12 hours.

Well, overall, it was better than staying at home.