Arkansas, Hot Springs: We Missed Important Sunshine

For our friends and family reading this journal entry, and any other people who have started following our 2007 travels this year, you may wonder why we have a fourth entry for Hot Springs, Arkansas. Since we based ourselves at Judy's (Kyle's mum) house for the start of the summer, we had returned there yet again, before moving on to our final destinations in the United States.

The trip to Hot Springs was the last trip there for us and we spent most of the time packing all of our things for the rest of the year. We also found time to box up and ship items back to London, where we no longer needed them or had bought them especially for our return home. Finally, we managed to catch up on movies that we had not yet seen.

One hair-raising moment was when Jenny started singing a little loudly in the post office

Our flight to Little Rock International Airport was uneventful, but since we took an earlier flight from Nashville, Tennessee, we arrived in Little Rock a couple of hours sooner than expected. Judy and Marc, Kyle's stepdad, were happy about this as we had planned to spend the afternoon with them in Little Rock before heading back to their home in Hot Springs.

When the two of them had met us at the airport, the first thing we had to take care of was an errand for Marc, whereby he needed to purchase a bed cover for the new truck he and Judy had bought earlier in the summer. Whilst they shopped, we entertained ourselves by reading the newspaper to check out the Little Rock movie times, and also by playing a few games of the infamous card game S***head, which we had not played for a while.

After they had chosen the perfect truck bed cover, we went for lunch at Shorty Small's, a barbecue restaurant that served a variety of dishes besides barbecue. To start, we shared fried mozzarella cheesesticks with Judy and Marc as well as twice-baked potato skins covered with bacon bits, cheese and sour cream. For a main course, we shared a barbecue pulled pork sandwich that came with an enormous helping of french fries; to drink, we each had sweet ice tea, something that Dan has grown to really like over the past month and a half in the States.

We couldn't stop staring at the huge helping of nachos that was placed in front of Judy and Marc, covered with every delicious topping imaginable, like jalapenos, cheese, olives, barbecue meats, tomatoes, etc. The meal was enjoyable; the only thing that was a bit iffy was the barbecue sauce with the nachos; neither Marc nor Judy went ga-ga over it. We remembered that they said it was way too sweet, and Dan concurred, since he just remembered that he tried it, too.

Judy and Marc were ready to head back to Hot Springs after lunch, but we needed to try and find something for our trip, so we asked if they wanted to join us in our search for the elusive item (a wallet). We had no luck after checking inside Academy Sports, a large sports store chain, and a Columbia Sportswear store; they had luck, though. If we remember correctly, Judy purchased a birthday gift for Samantha (Kyle's niece) at Academy Sports and Marc purchased a t-shirt at the Columbia store that he would be able to wear as a jogging shirt.

It was boiling hot and most of the goods in the Columbia store were hanging on stands or placed on tables outside on the asphalt because they were having an "outdoor" sale. Shopping outside in 100 degree Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) weather was not the most enjoyable thing to do, especially since the humidity made it feel more like 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43 degrees Celsius). Seriously, we had no idea what the Columbia store management was thinking when they set that up. Anyway, Marc and Judy took their time shopping there, apparently used to the heat or just really fond of looking through the bargains, whilst dripping with sweat. We amused ourselves by standing inside the store's entrance door, next to a large oscillating fan, blocking the cool air from hitting anyone dumb enough to peruse the sale items outside.

Seeing movies is something that both of us are a little bit obsessed with, as most of you probably now know. Therefore, you won't be surprised when we write down the fact that we went to Market Street Cinema to see a couple of movies, before heading back to Hot Springs. The choices there were very good because the movie theatre was an independent one showing non-mainstream choices. "Day Watch" was a Russian movie sequel to "Night Watch", which we had seen in London a couple of years ago. The movie was quite original and just as good as the first one, if not a little bit better. We thought that the story was now completed and, even though the ending was slightly anticlimactic, it was a nice way to close the plot.

The second movie that we watched was "Waitress", with Keri Russell. The film was funny and had a great situation-driven script, with strong performances by all of the actors and actresses. We were going to see a third movie that evening, "Rescue Dawn", but we decided to head back to Hot Springs instead, to avoid getting back there too late. The drive was only an hour and it had only just gotten dark, so we had time to stop at Taco Bell for some food, to prime our energy for the drive. When we returned to Judy's and Marc's house, we worked on something very exciting, indeed; we started creating music CD's for our road trip!

Since we just told you about the movies that we saw in Little Rock when we arrived there from Nashville, we should go ahead and tell you about two more movies that we saw a couple of days later, when we went back to Little Rock for the day. We were expecting a day full of "sunshine" because the weather was great, because a movie with the same name was playing at The Rave Movie Theatre, and because we expected to meet up with one of Kyle's friends with the same name, who lived in Little Rock. As someone famous once said (we can't remember who - sorry!), "Two outta three ain't bad" - we saw the new Danny Boyle movie titled "Sunshine" and we drank in the weather whenever we were outside, moving between locations.

What we failed on was meeting up with Sunshine; we failed because, when Kyle exchanged voicemails with her, they could never get the timing to work out. For example, she returned a call to Kyle when we were both watching "The Simpsons Movie", the first movie we had seen that day, and when he returned her call, she was back at work and not available to talk. To make a long story short, we had to get back to Hot Springs after seeing "Sunshine" (the movie, not the person - we hope that you are not confused) and didn't have time to see her or Stan, another friend of Kyle's whom we had met up with when we first arrived in the US in the middle of June.

Whilst still on the topic of movies, we can tell you about the DVDs that we watched at Judy's and Marc's house. "Breach" was liked by the four of us; we thought it was extremely interesting and enjoyable, a surprise because we had not heard of the movie. The second DVD we watched was an older film called "Suspect Zero". We never finished it because it put us to sleep and we didn't even want to try to watch it again; it should have been called "Suspect Zzzzzz".

Judy and Marc were up for some racquetball games, so the four of us played on our first full day in Hot Springs, the day before we went back for some Little Rock sunshine, for those of you trying to keep up with the itinerary. We played doubles, us against them, and ended up giving them a thrashing, most likely because they were moving a little slowly due to (a) having had some drinks the night before, (b) being "slightly" older than us, or (c) all of the above. Even though we killed them, we all had fun (although we were a little bit skeptical of Marc's enjoyment level) and ended up playing for over two hours.

Brooklyn style pizza was available from Dominos in their Arkansas stores and we ordered some one evening, after jumping for joy upon realisation of the news. We had only been introduced to the delicious way of cooking pizzas a couple of days before in Nashville, by Kyle's cousins (Kimberly and Carmen), but we didn't hold back when we had the opportunity to try some more. We had to make sure that the deliciousness wasn't just a fluke when we had eaten it the first time. It wasn't and Judy can also attest to the fact, even though she had to sneak a piece in on the diet she was undergoing.

We have eaten a lot (the quantities are truly ENORMOUS) of unhealthy food in America - enabling us to completely understand, from our ever-expanding waistlines and sore guts, why the country has a problem with obesity - and we have to admit that we ate KFC on one of the days that we were in Hot Springs. Kyle had a mashed potato bowl with chicken tenders and corn mixed in with the potatoes; he liked it. Dan ordered some small, snack-size barbecue and plain chicken and cheese sandwiches; he detested them. We haven't eaten KFC since, but don't be surprised if it appears back on the list sometime before we leave the US on 10th September; we are terrible hypocrites, aren't we?

One morning for breakfast, we treated ourselves to a full-sized American breakfast at Perkins, a chain restaurant that was similar to a Denny's. The food was good but the portions were way too much for both of us. We had woken up early to take Kyle's mum to work so we could use her car during the day and it was still quite early when we finished eating, so we went to Wal-Mart to walk off some of the food and also to buy some packaging materials that we could use to ship some things back to London. After we had bought the items we needed, we left for Little Rock; now you should be able to piece more of our itinerary together.

On our final day in Hot Springs, Kyle took Judy to work at 6:45am whilst Dan slept in that morning. When Kyle returned from taking his mum, he decided to go back to sleep, since the house was quiet, and woke up a few hours later. Dan was already awake at that point and he started packing his things for the rest of our year's trip. Kyle continued working on some DVD movies that he was making for his parents and grandmother; the movies showed all of the photos from the Asian Exploration portion of our 2007 adventure, all 8,500 of them. There were five DVDs in total, each running between 2 and 2-1/2 hours, and they went over very well when he gave them to his family, before leaving Arkansas for good (this year).

Seeing Jenny (Kyle's MeeMaw - his grandma) and Bob (Kyle's grandpa) was high on our list of things to do before leaving that evening to go to Fayetteville, Arkansas, where we would pay a final visit to Kelli (Kyle's sister), Clay (Kyle's brother-in-law) and Samantha (Kyle's niece) before our road trip got underway. We visited with Bob and Jenny for a short while at their house and then we took Jenny to get some iced tea, to go to the post office, to surprise Judy at her workplace and, finally, to eat lunch at Ruby Tuesday.

Jenny did extremely well with us for the few hours that we took her out on the town. She was 92 and had bad Alzheimer's, so we were worried that she wouldn't want to stay out with us for the entire time that we had planned with her. It ended up being an excellent final visit with her and Judy was surprised but happy that we stopped by her work to see her.

One hair-raising moment was when Jenny started singing a little loudly in the post office, where Dan was sending gifts from Asia back to his family in Essex, and where we were both sending items there that we wanted back in the UK when we returned in January. Of course, that moment with Jenny was not as embarrassing as the one in the hospital where Judy worked, when Jenny shouted out "Wow, people are getting so fat these days" at the same time a large woman walked by in front of us. It all tied back to the unhealthy diet and food options in the US; people with Alzheimer's wouldn't have to shout out their true thoughts and feelings if the diets changed.

When we returned Jenny to her house, Bob was very appreciative that we had taken her out for the afternoon and he gave us both some money for our trip. It was very much appreciated and we left, knowing that we had done a good deed that day. We had done another good deed that morning by taking Marc's truck to a tire (American spelling, we know that it really should be "tyre") garage, to fix a flat tire. The truck was ready when we dropped Jenny off, but we didn't pick it up until we picked Judy up from work. When we dropped the truck off that morning, we had left Judy's car at Wal-Mart and we walked thirty minutes down the road, from the tire garage to Wal-Mart, where we bought another box (think of the items we shipped from the post office that day) and picked up Judy's car to drive to Jenny's and Bob's house.

We didn't mention yet that Marc had left Hot Springs on our third day back in Hot Springs. He had a meeting in Washington D.C. and left early, before we made it back to their house from taking Judy to work, from having breakfast and from shopping at Wal-Mart. When Judy got off work on our final day at her house, we picked her up, went to the tire place to pick up Marc's truck and then picked up all of our things from the house, including the bags that she had packed. She was driving us to Fayetteville, so it wasn't goodbye to her just yet!