We arrived back in Cincinnati—College Hill to be specific—and Mike backed the Scamp into the driveway where we were staying with great aplomb. I was impressed. We had a lovely stay with Bob and Rhonda, although almost every day we had an appointment of some kind to keep; usually doctor’s appointments but also haircuts and what not. We shared the house with a lovely golden retriever named Frida, and a crochety little dog named Lucy, who was also a temporary boarder. Lucy didn’t like me, but Frida did. And I am told that Lucy doesn’t like anyone, so that made me feel a little better. We don’t like to outstay our welcome, so after a week we moved on to stay with our friends Ray and Donna. More doctor appointments, but mostly good reviews from all the medical types, so we’re pretty sure we’re going to get out of here in the time we’d planned and head back out on the open road. Which is great news. At Ray and Donna’s house, Frankie the dog rules the roost. He is a quite nice little...

The bootheel of Missouri is cotton country. We saw fields of stubble with bits of cotton bolls still sticking to them; they haven’t sowed new cotton plants yet this year. Cotton, I have learned, is botanically perennial when it grows naturally in the tropics, but it is almost always grown as an annual crop when cultivated in temperate climates. Interesting factoid. Cotton is the main crop in the bootheel of Missouri, the southernmost part of the state (Wikimedia) Beyond that, well, we crossed the Mississippi, wide and muddy down there below the confluence of the Ohio River, and spent a couple of hours in Tennessee, in the far northwestern corner. From there, we crossed into Kentucky and went north to Paducah, where there’s a lot of quilt stuff. I was trying to figure out a way to connect that with King Cotton in the Missouri bootheel, since many quilts are made of cotton material, but we’re two states away from Missouri now, so I don’t think that’s going to work. But I did have the o...

 The road through eastern Oklahoma/the Choctaw Nation is a long strip of kind of cheesy resort places for quite a distance. The town of Broken Bow is proud of the fact that their casino complex has the only Starbucks within 70 miles—a dubious honor. There were sketchy zoos and mini golf and other oddball roadside attractions for miles. Then we got into the Ouachita Mountains and some beautiful scenery. The Ouachita Mountains in Arkansas We stopped at a lot of overlooks, including one that had the Monument of Three Sticks. Not kidding, that’s what it was called. The plaque said the sticks represent the water, land, and trees of the area, and was put up by a group encouraging development, which seemed counterintuitive. But I do like an odd monument. The Monument of Three Sticks We stopped for gas and fried pies in a little wide spot in the road called Smithville—or Octavia, hard to say exactly—and the clerks admired our Scamp, as often happens. We are a novelty on the road and in cam...

New Braunfels was our last stop in the Texas Hill Country. We took off and headed north and east to Nacogdoches. There are Caddo Indian mounds just to the east of Nacogdoches that we wanted to stop and see. We stayed overnight at an RV park in Crockett, Texas, on the way, which was of course named for Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier. And we had dinner at Davy Crockett’s Bar & Grill, where I had another great Texas hamburger. I think I’ve eaten more hamburgers on this trip through Texas than in the past year all together. Davy Crockett is, of course, a hero of the Alamo, and a big name in Texas history. (Believe me, I’ve edited a lot of history textbooks for Texas adoption, and they all have a big section on Texas history, so I do know a thing or two about it.) When Davy Crockett lost re-election to Congress from Tennessee, which may or may not have been due to some dirty tricks by then-President Andrew Jackson, he is alleged to have said, “You may all go to hell, and I a...

From Garner State Park we drove up to Kerrville via a scenic route through the Texas Hill Country. Mike says we were really driving through small mountains; Texans just call it “the Hill Country” because even the hills are bigger in Texas. We didn’t realize we were going to be following the Guadalupe River, so we hadn’t been expecting to see the devastation from the floods that happened there in July 2025. It was clear in places how much water had come torrenting through, with trees knocked down and debris carried with the water. We saw battered buildings and places where there was nothing left but the foundations of houses. The small town of Hunt, Texas, still had tents set up providing food and other supplies to residents who had been affected by the flooding. There were also some beautiful places along the Guadalupe River, but it seemed like a lot of people were also just rebuilding in the same place. All we could figure was that the floods had been considered a “hundred-year ev...