February 21, 2005 - Drive to Little Rock, Arkansas.

During the night I thought of three things I needed to add to the journal entries for the last few days. Trying to keep those thoughts in my head, I turned Baby on as soon as we got up for the day and started typing away like mad. I was afraid of forgetting those ideas as I had already forgotten the one insight about the Albuquerque Pueblo culture museum for a couple of days. The only thing worse than not having any inspiration for writing is having inspiration and then forgetting it!

I only wrote a total of 4 paragraphs and it seemed to me that it had just taken a few minutes, but Monika had been waiting for breakfast and was more acutely aware of the passing time. She said I had taken over ½ an hour typing and I was very surprised. I think the phenomenon is called a "flow" experience where complete task involvement makes one insensitive to any of the normal time cues or extraneous environmental stimuli. I do get very involved with the writing sometimes, so that probably was what happened.

After I apologized for delaying breakfast so long, we ate some cold cereal, prepared the inside of the trailer for traveling, unhooked the water and electric connections, retracted the stabilizers, and started driving eastward, ever eastward. Little Rock, the destination for our next Volksmarch, was only about 180 miles or a 3-4 hour drive. Interstate 40 in Arkansas seemed to be skirting the southern edge of the Ozark Mountains, so we drove around some of the foothills and it was very nice to be back in an eastern deciduous forest even if it was winter. The temperatures were in the 70s when we stopped for lunch, however, and it certainly felt more like spring than winter, which was nice. The birds were all fluttering about like it was spring, and I also heard frogs croaking in some marshland next to our campground. Besides the occasional marshy area, we passed several large lakes on this stretch and the sky was getting hazier, all signs that we had entered the more humid part of the heartland and really left the desert southwest behind.

Since I took two turns driving and Monika only had one, I won the Truck Blink context by a score of 16 to 12. What with lunch and some time out shopping at Kroger in between, we arrived at our campground in Burns Park on the north side of town (north of the Arkansas River) about 2:00 p.m.. We found a nice, level, and very long paved site that I backed into successfully on the first try. Hurray! This time we fully unhitched the trailer before leveling it, putting down the stabilizers, and connecting the utilities.

We had contemplated driving in to do the walk that afternoon, but we were both just a little too tired to be motivated enough for that. It was President's Day, and we also faced the possibility that the Visitor Center would be closed for the day even if we did drive in. So we ended up resting for the afternoon by working, playing or reading on the computers, interspersed with non-computer activities such as a nap. I seemed to be suffering some kind of cumulative fatigue from the three days of driving we had just done. But the nap was refreshing and we later walked around the campground for an hour or so and Monika's ankle held up fine.

The campground manager finally returned for the night and we paid $30 for the 2 days at the campground. I was surprised to hear her say that she was late because she had taken her daughter and granddaughter to a gambling casino for the day. It just never occurred to me that gambling would be the grounds for a family outing with the children. We used to do family bicycle rides, but family gambling trips? Why not just play "Monopoly" with real money? That way at least the money would stay in the family. Maybe the family that "gambles together, stays (poor) together"! Given the casual way our campground host imparted that information to us, gambling apparently has become normative for a large section of the American public.

It is curious what addictions our culture is now encouraging and which ones it is discouraging. Addictions to alcohol, nicotine, and gambling are officially encouraged while addictions to amphetamines, pot, and narcotics are officially discouraged. Addictions to prescription drugs such as Rush Limbaugh's are not exactly encouraged, but winked at by the authorities and so are in a gray area as I see it. The encouraged versus prohibited addictions change dramatically from culture to culture, but also across time in any given culture. When I was young, for example, my religious training equated gambling with stealing and declared it to be wrong, sinful, evil, etc. Now gambling is touted as wonderful harmless fun, a financial boon to beleaguered governments, a good source of jobs, and a miraculous gusher of free money for everyone. How that prohibition shifted to encouragement in one generation would be an interesting case study in cultural change, I guess, but it certainly is unsettling to have yesterday's cultural verities replaced with today's absolute opposites.

After a brief stop for dinner I read Nicholas Nickleby on Baby while Monika processed pictures and made backups on Daddy. Dickens certainly is long winded sometimes, and I found myself "reading diagonally" as Monika described it, in some of the sections that appeared completely tangential to the central story. Around 9 o'clock we turned in to read a few more chapters in "The Last Kingdom" before turning out the lights. Since the book's story is set in ancient Britain, it was "long ago and far away" in my view, which made it slightly easier to close for the book for the night when it was time to sleep.