Northwest Arkansas

I don't have a lot of overnights these days because I bid for locals and red-eyes, so it was a bit of an anomaly to have a four-day trip pop up on my schedule. I was not looking forward to the overnights as they all had early morning shows, but I arrived around noon today to northwest Arkansas Regional Airport today on a deadhead from O'hare and had the rest of the day to explore. Some of you might know this area as Wally*World, or Wal*Mart Country. It's where Sam Walton had his first store and his company seems to own post of northwest Arkansas.

Next to our hotel was an amphitheater owned by Wal*Mart. The ubiquity of Wal*Mart stores themselves seems to be on par with Starbucks in Seattle. The hotel shuttle would take people into town for free, so after I grabbed some lunch, I went from the town of Roberts into the town of Bentonville. The main square of the town is like something from another era. This is also where the Walton's "Five and Dime" is, which has been converted into a museum. As it was free, I decided to take a look. It is kind of like going to a presidential library, where history becomes more subjective and nothing bad ever happened.

 Some of the more interesting aspects of the museum were the story of Sam Walton himself. He seemed to lead a surprisingly modest life and drove an old Ford pickup truck. He also apparently flew airplanes to scout locations for new stores and there was a video of other workers commenting on his flying. "Oh that Sam, flying into restricted airspace and getting intercepted by fighter jets." Or, "He did a dead-stick landing because he thought he ran out of gas. He just forgot to switch fuel tanks." Sam Walton was apparently a terrible pilot.

I suppose if the FAA comes after you and you're Sam Walton, you just give them discounts to Sam's Club...

Anyway, after the Wal*Mart museum, I walked to a place called Crystal Bridges Museum. I had to go down some trails through the woods to get to it. It focuses on American artwork and how it has changed throughout the centuries starting with things like portraits of George Washington to Norman Rockwell and Andy Warhol.

It was fairly interesting and best of all free because (no surprise) Wal*Mart owns the entire complex. I enjoyed some of the museum's modern stuff, which was borderline creepy with its realism. One of the exhibits was just candy in a pile against a wall with a caption that said the exhibit was interactive and you could eat and taste the exhibit. No thanks. That candy's probably been there since 1998.

But this 3-d self-portrait was one thing that literally stood out for me. Another room had a very lifelike wax figure of an old man sitting on a bench bored. When I finally finished walking through the museum, I couldn't find a way out. It's like they wanted to keep me there (no doubt a tactic inspired by Wal*Mart). After about 20 minutes of walking in circles, I escaped back to the trails and walked back to the main town square.

Shortly after I got there, the trees and decorations illuminated and christmas music began to play from speakers. It was actually a pretty impressive setup for a smaller town. One thing I found interesting, however, was the statue of a confederate soldier in the middle of the square. The hotel shuttle driver had very strong opinions about it and why it needed to stay, but the real irony in it all was a sign in front of the statue telling people not to throw coins into the fountain or add anything to the statue etc. Yet here it was in the middle of the square essentially transformed into a neon christmas tree.

After snapping a few pictures in and around the square, I called up my new friend, the shuttle driver, and he gave me a lift back to the hotel while adding his commentary about how the town's changing and how it's too built up and so forth. To be fair, there was a surprising amount of traffic on the way back to the hotel, which he claimed was to make me feel more at home. I bid my southern friend adieu and attempted to thaw out inside the hotel. All in all, I was pleasantly surprised by this region. The shuttle driver may not like the growth, but it's certainly helping the economy - even if everything is owned by Wal*Mart.

Home for Thanksgiving

Well kids, it's been a while. I have pretty good excuses for not blogging, however. One being that I was in foreign lands. You can read about all of that here. Beyond that, I have had very few overnights as I typically prefer either locals or redeyes. In fact, for the upcoming month of December, I will be home every night except a red-eye to San Antonio. I recently returned from another trip to Guanajuato in Mexico, but my grand plans to further explore the surrounding areas failed abysmally. Apparently I have never been in town on a Saturday and everything was packed. No food, no mummy museum, no room to walk. Other crew members took a cab to Leon to buy shoes on the cheap, but their journey took 5x longer than it should have due to a soccer match and a balloon festival taking place in the city. So that's that. After this trip, I had a couple of locals to not so far off places like Denver and Phoenix and then found myself home for Thanksgiving despite not even asking for it off. Tis the game we play.

With just three days off, I didn't really have time to go away, so I elected to stay put and relax. I convinced my parents to fly to Hawaii via Austin, where I could physically fly them to LAX for their connecting flight to Lihue. It would be the first time they had been passengers with me behind the controls since I took them on a trip to Santa Barbara in a small Piper Cherokee. Without much drama, they were able to fly standby on all of their flights and found themselves back in LA for Thanksgiving after galavanting with the menehunes and eating poi.

Whereas the rest of the country seemed to be averaging highs in the 20s and 30s, Los Angeles was hitting 85 every day with ease. We took advantage by trying to be outside whether that was walking along the beach at sunset or standing in line at Randy's for some donuts.

As none of us are terribly keen on actual turkey, I prepared a beef brisket as our main course. I made croque madames on San Francisco sourdough bread for lunch. It was certainly not a traditional thanksgiving, though we did have some pumpkin pie because it was on sale at Ralph's for $3.99.

While waiting for the slow-cooker to do its work on the brisket, I took the folks to Venice beach so that they can be thankful for not living in Venice beach. One would have had no idea it was Thanksgiving. It was packed and all the stores were open.

I suggested we rent metrobikes and go down the bike path. With a little nudging, they were convinced. We rode to the Santa Monica pier and back. All in all, not a bad Thanksgiving. I go to many places and write about all of my adventures, but sometimes it's nice to just appreciate what I have in my own backyard. Mmmmm donuts.