Fun on the Road

We were in Northeast Oklahoma for Sonja's open house for her husband Jordan's side of the family. The day after the reception, we took a two day road trip through Northeast Oklahoma, Northwest Arkansas, and Southwest Missouri. We'd never been to this part of the country, and enjoy being off the freeway. I took a bunch of pictures of stuff that just looked fun or interesting.

Our first trip off the turnpike showed this sign leading to a Mennonite church. We decided to take a look. A later sign said that it was 1.5 miles. Two miles later we decided that we'd missed it, but on the way back we came across a few Mennonites complete with horse and buggy.

It's hard to tell from this picture taken in the car, but it was a one-horse buggy with a father and a couple of kids in it. (I heard that they don't like their photo taken, that's why I didn't try to take the picture out of the driver's window.) Being Mennonites, they probably hadn't seen the movie Field of Dreams. So I didn't have the opportunity to have this exchange: "Is this Eden?" "No, it's Oklahoma!"

I felt like I've been on this road before, but now I have proof that it exists!

Another interesting thing was learning about some of the wildlife...or in our case, "wild-death." On our two-lane road adventure we saw a lot of racoon and opossum roadkill, which was to be expected. What we didn't expect was to see armadillos! Lots of them. Here's a typical view of an Arkansas/Missouri backroad:

Wendy made the observation that armadillos looked reptilian with their scaly exterior, yet they are mammals, which by definition have hair/fur. As you can see, armadillos are hairy on their underbelly.

We were at a National Battleground and I asked the Ranger if he was a naturalist. He said he wasn't but would entertain my question anyway. I asked if armadillos have always been in these parts since I always pictured them to be in hot, dry, lands in Texas. He said that he was raised in Southern Missouri & was was taught by his dad that they didn't really live in Missouri, but periodically dead armadillos would be trucked in from Texas and scattered around the state on the roadsides.

I flipped our little roadkill over, and it's easy to see how a car could hit one in the darker part of the day - They're slow, low, and blend in with the color of the asphalt.

(Note - no armadillos were harmed in the creation of this blog post. - The harm had already taken place.)

I'll post more of our midwest adventure in future blogs.