We’ve been trying to eat up the miles, but have had a few nice interludes. We left Elk City without exploring it, hoping to get to Little Rock quickly. The miles flew by until lunch time, when I pulled into Checotah, OK. There was a place called June’s, staffed by teenagers or twenty somethings, I can’t tell, with the food cooked by the granddaughter of June. They seemed to specialize in chicken, so that’s what I had.

Good choice. Mom had a BLT. Another good choice. And we took little apple pies with us to go. A delicious choice. When we left I popped into the Dusty Attic, an antique store with too many choices, but found a couple Christmas presents and a couple nice black and white drawings of old oil derricks. There were many antiques stores in this town, but we had to eat up the miles.

Got to Little Rock after dark, of course, and stayed with the cool kids at an Aloft hotel, made to seem like you were staying at a loft somewhere hip. The bar was open til midnight and there was a pool and fire wall in the back ‘yard’.

The music pumped til mid nite but we did not. The bass was a tad forward, but I was tired enough to fall asleep anyway. I like the design efforts although I’m not sure about the hallway lights:

We had plenty of time to make it to Nashville by sunset, until we stopped for lunch at BB King’s Blues Bar, in Memphis.

Nice town. We ate while listening to the Beale Street Trio, certainly helping our digestion.

Rolled into Nashville around 6 pm, to stay with the cool kids again at Bobby hotel. Had drinks and baked Brie at the rooftop bar. So good.

The scenery was mostly unremarkable since arriving in Oklahoma. I found OK to be rather tidy, without the usual piles of landscaping trash like trees and brush, or old cars or farm equipment one might see in other places. It was mostly farmland, no longer desert, and even had standing water in places. The horizons were still far away across the fields in OK.

In Arkansas, the horizons moved closer, often obscured by trees.

Since leaving New Mexico, the land is basically farmland. The Texas panhandle, Oklahoma, and Arkansas were all agricultural. The outskirts of Elk City made it seem like you could buy anything you might possibly need for whatever project you might have. Trucks of any kind, even cement trucks, which I’d never seen on a lot for sale, pipes, farm equipment, cars, hardware, were neatly displayed along the highway.

I didn’t get a good sense of Little Rock, but it sprawled for a few miles of highway. Both states were largely flat. The closer we got to the Mississippi, the wetter the land became. It looked as though there was heavy rain recently, as some fields were under water.

Tennessee has hills. The trees closed in to the highway, and the road rose and fell and curved. Nashville is larger than I expected, and pretty.

Tomorrow we trek to Asheville, to have dinner with Peter and Gail, and to see my Uncle Joe again.