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I arrived home safely last night. Hubby dropped me off at the Little Rock airport yesterday (Friday) at about 1:45 PM. That’s central time, by the way. Then he continued toward home. He stopped for the night just west of Nashville in Dickson, Tennessee. And he arrived home just after 8:00 PM tonight (Saturday). That was 750 miles of riding today alone!

It was quite a trip. What you see above is the back of Hubby’s helmet. I saw a LOT of that!

Here’s a screen shot from Hubby’s GPS that shows his total trip mileage.

Remember, I cheated. I flew to Oklahoma City because I don’t like long rides.

But Hubby tricked me. I ended up being in the saddle for about 1,000 miles anyway!

It was a nice trip, though. I am not complaining. The weather was perfect. Oklahoma was quite big, and quite beautiful. Arkansas looked a lot like West Virginia, just on a larger scale.

The thing I got most tired of, besides staring at the back of Hubby’s helmet, was smelling dead stuff. When you’re in a car, you don’t realize how aromatic road kill can be! I saw HUNDREDS of dead armadillos. We saw quite a few live critters, too. You’ll see lots of animals in the pics, if you look. But I also saw a couple of coyotes, which I didn’t capture on film, lots and lots of turtles, a whole slew of vultures, plus innumerable cows, horses, goats, sheep, llamas, alpacas, etc. I saw a cowboy, too! Not Marlboro Man, unfortunately. Apparently Pioneer Woman and her clan live further north in Oklahoma than the areas we covered.

Wanna see some of the pictures we ended up with? There are a mix of images Hubby and I both shot. Quite a few were taken by me with Hubby’s camera while I was riding on the back of his bike. I hope you enjoy the scenery as much as we did!

I do have quite a few pics from Oklahoma, believe it or not. But there’s not a good photo editing program on Hubby’s computer, which I need for resizing and uploading. So the posting of pics will just have to wait until I get home.

Most of the pics anyway. I just had to post this one shot of the road to Mena across the Talimena National Scenic Byway.

It is far more mountainous here in Arkansas than I expected.

Oklahoma was beautiful, but in a much different way. As you’ll see when I finally post the pics I took. Sorry to make you wait.

For now, we have another 300+ mile ride today, so I better get ready…

This weekend was basically uneventful, aside from Hubby’s departure, which I mentioned in yesterday’s post.

I did take a few interesting photos, though. Like this one…

I have no idea what this is. It looks like the body of a butterfly, but its “wings” are only about 1/4″ long. It flapped them furiously as it walked. Quite an odd little critter, if I do say so myself.

No critters here. Just a cute, little purple flower.

Now this is the kind of turtle one would expect to find in the woods or backyard (unlike the turtle I found in my MD yard last week). It is a box turtle. I actually saw two of them on Saturday.

And here’s my little princess with what, at first glance, I assumed was a bit of decayed log.

I was wrong. It was a decayed critter. So decayed in fact, that it was unidentifiable. After convincing her to drop it, which was not easy, I had to dispose of it. If I just tossed it off into the woods, she’d go retrieve it. Heck, for all I know, she killed it months ago and hid it.

I grabbed a very large leaf from a nearby plant, which I used to lift the critter for the short walk back to the house. It wasn’t too bad. It was very dried up, and had barely any weight to it. I grabbed a plastic grocery bag and dropped it in. Right before I dropped it into the bag is when things got gross. Just as I was holding it over the mouth of the bag, a big, slimy, cadaver-eating worm-thing squiggled out and dropped to the floor in front of me.

Ew, ew, ew!

No pics of that one. Lucky you!

The next post should be from Oklahoma…

We stayed home from WV this weekend so Hubby could get some time in the saddle of his motorcycle. He needs to shake off the winter cobwebs, achieve that comfort level that only comes from long hours of riding in a variety of conditions.

He plotted out a 200+ mile trek. I wasn’t feeling up to a long ride. Plus, I had some odds and ends to get done around the house.

So I stayed home.

One of those little chores was taking a bit of trash to the dump. What an adventure!

I’ve never been to the dump on a Saturday. I usually go during the week. Either early in the morning, before work, or at lunchtime. There’s hardly ever anyone there. Today, there was a line of vehicles just waiting to get in.

Once on the property, there were bumper-to-bumper cars, pick-up trucks and SUVs snaking their way back to the bulk trash area.

When I finally got to the dumping spot, with my boxes of trash, there was a worker dude there to help. Yet another anomaly to me.

Said worker dude was scolding me because I wanted to dump my boxes of trash into the bin.

“Cardboard can be recycled,” he says.

“But these cardboard boxes are full of trash,” I replied.

“Just dump the boxes and I’ll put the cardboard into the recycle bin,” was his response.

Weird. At least he offered to take the boxes away for me. No one had ever told me that one before. So I commenced dumping the boxes.

The last box was full of old beer glasses.

“Wait,” he said as I was about to dump them. “Glass can be recycled, too.”

He had a point. So I gave him that and off he went.

Where are the helpful dump workers when I have a truck full of heavy stuff to discard?

There was still a line of cars waiting to enter when I left. I don’t think I’ll ever go to the dump on a Saturday again.

This past weekend was far less eventful than last weekend.

It was pretty wet, but very relaxing.

I took lots of pictures, which I still have to cull through. Everything was very green. The trees have really filled out over the past week.

For whatever reason, I like taking pictures of trees and stuff with water dripping off of them. I thought I’d share a couple for now.

I’ll have more to say about the weekend later…

The calendar may say it is mid-April, but it sure doesn’t feel like mid-April.

Saturday dawned cold and rainy. That didn’t stop the dogs from enjoying the outdoors though. Both Meg (pictured at left) and Belle love being outside at the WV place. Rain or no, they love running through the woods. Both got quite wet and muddy, but Meg was by far the muddiest.

Wanna know what road spray looks like on the underbelly of a dog? Take a look at Meg’s dirty belly.

Belle was wet and muddy, too. But I’m guessing Meg spent more time running through the wet dirt as opposed to the wet leaves, which is why her belly got so much dirtier than Belle’s did.

Belle had her share of dirty, too. But that came a bit later in the day.

Both girls were happy when Buddy showed up for his usual visit.

By then, thankfully, the sun had come out. After they played with Buddy for a while, we headed down to his house. His Mom worries if he stays away too long.

There’s a nice little creek that meanders through Buddy’s yard. It seems a groundhog built a burrow on the bank of the creek amid some tree roots. Belle was doing her best to sniff out the varmint.

You should have seen the girl poking and prodding among the tree roots. She was even walking on some downed logs like she’s a squirrel or something. Or maybe a mountain goat. She loves poking and crawling over and under downed trees.

After giving up on the groundhog, Belle and Buddy chased each other around the yard a good bit.

Then Buddy uncovered his treasure–a deer leg–to show Belle.

Belle was quite impressed. Meg had gone home by then and missed out on that particular gem. And that’s a good thing. I don’t think she would have given up on it quite as easily.

Weather-wise, the rest of the weekend was fine. Though temperatures never did climb out of the 50s. This morning, back in Maryland, it was still only 31.5 degrees when I let the dogs out for their morning constitutional. I think we’re supposed to get rain later today, too.

We did bring the motorcycles home. No telling when it will warm up enough for us to ride, though.