A Quick Wrap-up... What, No Pictures?!!!

Our final morning at Hayden Creek, we packed up and got moving.  Okay, so I took a few pictures before leaving, and on the road until the landscape went flat.  The ants were happy to see us go, as we had apparently been smothering their nest with our tent.  I imagine that, for them, it might have been similar to the movie Independence Day – when the alien spaceships hovered over major cities, causing mass panic and evacuation!

It looks like a muffin!

All those white things are ant eggs.

Evacuation.

Hmm...

We were far ahead of our original schedule for the overall trip, and had seen most of the areas we’d planned on.  Being undecided about our next move, we fiddled around at a hotel for a couple of nights and got caught up on laundry and stocking our supplies.  Hitting the road again, we trekked straight across Kansas, which was a punishing, abysmally flat stretch of road.  It was prime real estate for the miles after miles of windmills churning away across the landscape.  The wind was strong and unrelenting, and was amplified by massive bursts every time a tractor trailer passed us in the opposite direction.  At every encounter, the hood of the Jeep vibrated so violently we thought it was going to fly right off.  We were pretty happy to get off the road that night.

Things calmed down a little as we passed through the rest of Kansas and into Missouri the next day.  After one more hotel night, we found ourselves a quiet little site at the North Fork Campground in the Mark Twain National Forest.  The surrounding area was very rural, with gentle rolling hills, green forest, and plenty of farmland.

The Devil’s Backbone Wilderness is nearby, but with its highest point situated at 1,020 feet, such a name failed to inspire any fear on our part.  There seemed to be nothing visibly devilish about this place, especially in contrast to many of the places we’d visited in the last two months.  With no readily apparent threats to our safety, and with comparatively moderate terrain, what else should we have felt?  I’m sure this is contextual; if we had come here straight from the subtropical flatlands of Florida, it would have been much more exciting!

Although it really was quite a lovely area, I found myself startlingly unmoved, and uninspired to take any pictures.  I didn’t take a single one.  The bigger part of the problem was that we knew the trip was coming to a close, and in reality, we were on our way home.  Ken always seems much more anxious to get back home once the decision is made, for he is not a procrastinator.  In contrast, I would prefer to stall for as long as possible.  When I’m enjoying what I’m doing, I really don’t want to stop, ever!  For me, going home at the end of a vacation means going back to the things we managed to escape briefly.  Once I’m back in the mix I’m fine, but I don’t like the transition.

We stayed two nights here, and during that time decided that this would be our last bit of camping for this trip.  We debated trying to fill the next couple of weeks with more stops, but realized all we’d be doing was killing time and spending money, and that the excitement was behind us.  So, we would go home and get a head start on getting the house back in order and settling in before going back to our jobs.

Our next day of driving showed us parts of six states – the last stretch of Missouri, Arkansas, about 20 miles in Tennessee passing through Memphis, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia!  We made an early departure on our last day of driving, and got home about mid-day.  We had a lot of work ahead of us to unpack all our gear, tend to the pets, get the house cleaned up… and start planning our future adventures!

The last few photos for this trip are in this album:  Leaving Colorado