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Up the Mountain and Down Again
Up the Mountain and Down Again
My wife and I celebrated our thirty-fourth Wedding anniversary recently by taking our annual trip to Oklahoma. We had a great time, but all didn’t go as planned.
We left here on Saturday morning, the twenty-first of February and stayed in a motel in Buffalo, Texas and visited her mother’s gravesite. Since it is a country cemetery dating back to the very early Eighteen hundreds we did a little cleanup around her mother, father, aunt and uncle’s graves and placed flowers there.
On Sunday, February twenty-second we left and made the drive to Idabel, Oklahoma where we stayed in another motel for the night. Nice room and nice people and since it is a fairly small town it is easy to find your way around.
Monday morning, February twenty-third we got up, ate breakfast and checked out, then went to the local Wal-Mart store to buy groceries to last until Thursday. We went to check out and neither of our bank cards would work. We each have separate accounts and we found out both her account and my account had been frozen for some reason. The next two hours were spent on the telephone trying to find out why this had happened. We finally got to the bottom of it and got someone in the mortgage department to straighten things out. It seems that a family with a very similar name and account number only one digit from ours were two months overdue on their mortgage payment and they froze our account by mistake. About fifteen minutes after this was discovered we were back in business, bought our groceries, filled up with gas and with cash in our pockets we were on our way. This put us almost an hour and a half late arriving at our cabin, but that was no problem as they had given us a code to open a lock box on the cabin containing our key. We unloaded the groceries, put them away, started a fire in the fireplace and rested a couple of hours.
About four o’clock we went for a walk down through the trail through the woods and along the cold stream. We walked out onto the rocks along the streambed ranging from pebble size to the size of a small car. The water is so clear you can see the fish swimming except in the deepest shadowed holes and the water has a bluish tint. The squirrels were busy with their gathering and eating and we came across a Possum that climbed a small tree as we came up on it, then climbed out onto a small branch giving us a beautiful camera angle for the picture we took.
Back up to the cabin where I cooked mushy fried potatoes with sausage and onions and canned biscuits for supper. We sat and ate by candlelight and a crackling fire. We watched a couple of hours of T.V. , then turned in for the night after taking a shower together in the large shower in the bathroom. Seems they have done extensive upgrading since our last stay with a large shower, a hot tub, very plush upscale towels, linens, bed and very plush bathrobes. A very pleasant surprise.
Tuesday morning I got up before the wife did and cooked soft-scrambled eggs, thick sliced bacon, biscuits with butter (real butter), coffee. I am not exactly sure if she woke up to the bacon frying or the coffee making, but she was awake and at the table by the time I had everything ready.
We showered again, then got into the truck and took a drive up through the mountains and then to a big earthen dam. It was a beautiful drive with lots of switchbacks and steep inclines, narrow roads, even narrower bridges and deer almost around every curve. We followed that up with another long walk through the woods and around the small spring fed lake near the cabin,
Late that afternoon, I grilled a couple of rib-eye steaks over mesquite, medium rare, while the wife peeled potatoes and cooked homemade fries and toast. After such a wonderful meal, there was only one thing left to do and that was to get into the hot tub of course! Damn, that is as much of that as you need to know! After getting inventive in the hot tub, we again showered and sat by the fire again. The wife watched some television while I sat and read to the warm flickering flames in the fireplace and the pungent smell of burning wood making all our cares evaporate. Around ten-thirty we went to bed and actually went to sleep about forty-five minutes later after a lot of cuddling.
Wednesday morning I again got up before the wife and cooked bacon and eggs with fried biscuits and coffee and again found her sitting at the table when I got it ready. I loaded the dishwasher and we showered and got dressed for the day. We drove down to Tallahena, Oklahoma and got on the Tallamena Parkway and drove over the mountains to Mena, Arkansas. We did a little shopping at Wal-Mart and a privately owned Grocery store. My wife loves Mellow Yellow Sodas and my son-in-law loves Nehi Peach Soda, neither of which can be found around where we live so we emptied the store shelves of each, eight cases of each brand to bring back with us. On the way back over the mountains on the Parkway, we ran into heavy fog and had to go along at about twenty to twenty-five mph for almost thirty miles before we got below it. We got back just a little before dark and I grilled some center cut boneless pork chops while the wife made mashed potatoes and green beans and garlic toast. It was a little cool outside, but we sat in the double lounger on the deck overlooking the mountain stream far below, listening to it gurgle and watched the stars come out first, in ones and twos and then by the hundreds. It was so dark you could not see your hand an inch from your face and there must have been a million stars in the sky. Orion was out in all its glory as was the Big Dipper and countless other configurations. A soft breeze was rusling the dry leaves still clinging stubbornly to the trees and sighing through the pines. It started getting a little too cool to be comfortable so we went inside and started another fire, drank hot chocolate and talked for a long while. We played around and got silly in the shower.
Thursday morning I cooked breakfast again, we made sure all the dishes were washed, dried and put away, then cleaned up everything. I cleaned the fireplace and grill, took out the trash, and we sadly left on the long, nine hour drive back home. Our sweet time over and done and looking forward to next year.
Rett
My wife and I celebrated our thirty-fourth Wedding anniversary recently by taking our annual trip to Oklahoma. We had a great time, but all didn’t go as planned.
We left here on Saturday morning, the twenty-first of February and stayed in a motel in Buffalo, Texas and visited her mother’s gravesite. Since it is a country cemetery dating back to the very early Eighteen hundreds we did a little cleanup around her mother, father, aunt and uncle’s graves and placed flowers there.
On Sunday, February twenty-second we left and made the drive to Idabel, Oklahoma where we stayed in another motel for the night. Nice room and nice people and since it is a fairly small town it is easy to find your way around.
Monday morning, February twenty-third we got up, ate breakfast and checked out, then went to the local Wal-Mart store to buy groceries to last until Thursday. We went to check out and neither of our bank cards would work. We each have separate accounts and we found out both her account and my account had been frozen for some reason. The next two hours were spent on the telephone trying to find out why this had happened. We finally got to the bottom of it and got someone in the mortgage department to straighten things out. It seems that a family with a very similar name and account number only one digit from ours were two months overdue on their mortgage payment and they froze our account by mistake. About fifteen minutes after this was discovered we were back in business, bought our groceries, filled up with gas and with cash in our pockets we were on our way. This put us almost an hour and a half late arriving at our cabin, but that was no problem as they had given us a code to open a lock box on the cabin containing our key. We unloaded the groceries, put them away, started a fire in the fireplace and rested a couple of hours.
About four o’clock we went for a walk down through the trail through the woods and along the cold stream. We walked out onto the rocks along the streambed ranging from pebble size to the size of a small car. The water is so clear you can see the fish swimming except in the deepest shadowed holes and the water has a bluish tint. The squirrels were busy with their gathering and eating and we came across a Possum that climbed a small tree as we came up on it, then climbed out onto a small branch giving us a beautiful camera angle for the picture we took.
Back up to the cabin where I cooked mushy fried potatoes with sausage and onions and canned biscuits for supper. We sat and ate by candlelight and a crackling fire. We watched a couple of hours of T.V. , then turned in for the night after taking a shower together in the large shower in the bathroom. Seems they have done extensive upgrading since our last stay with a large shower, a hot tub, very plush upscale towels, linens, bed and very plush bathrobes. A very pleasant surprise.
Tuesday morning I got up before the wife did and cooked soft-scrambled eggs, thick sliced bacon, biscuits with butter (real butter), coffee. I am not exactly sure if she woke up to the bacon frying or the coffee making, but she was awake and at the table by the time I had everything ready.
We showered again, then got into the truck and took a drive up through the mountains and then to a big earthen dam. It was a beautiful drive with lots of switchbacks and steep inclines, narrow roads, even narrower bridges and deer almost around every curve. We followed that up with another long walk through the woods and around the small spring fed lake near the cabin,
Late that afternoon, I grilled a couple of rib-eye steaks over mesquite, medium rare, while the wife peeled potatoes and cooked homemade fries and toast. After such a wonderful meal, there was only one thing left to do and that was to get into the hot tub of course! Damn, that is as much of that as you need to know! After getting inventive in the hot tub, we again showered and sat by the fire again. The wife watched some television while I sat and read to the warm flickering flames in the fireplace and the pungent smell of burning wood making all our cares evaporate. Around ten-thirty we went to bed and actually went to sleep about forty-five minutes later after a lot of cuddling.
Wednesday morning I again got up before the wife and cooked bacon and eggs with fried biscuits and coffee and again found her sitting at the table when I got it ready. I loaded the dishwasher and we showered and got dressed for the day. We drove down to Tallahena, Oklahoma and got on the Tallamena Parkway and drove over the mountains to Mena, Arkansas. We did a little shopping at Wal-Mart and a privately owned Grocery store. My wife loves Mellow Yellow Sodas and my son-in-law loves Nehi Peach Soda, neither of which can be found around where we live so we emptied the store shelves of each, eight cases of each brand to bring back with us. On the way back over the mountains on the Parkway, we ran into heavy fog and had to go along at about twenty to twenty-five mph for almost thirty miles before we got below it. We got back just a little before dark and I grilled some center cut boneless pork chops while the wife made mashed potatoes and green beans and garlic toast. It was a little cool outside, but we sat in the double lounger on the deck overlooking the mountain stream far below, listening to it gurgle and watched the stars come out first, in ones and twos and then by the hundreds. It was so dark you could not see your hand an inch from your face and there must have been a million stars in the sky. Orion was out in all its glory as was the Big Dipper and countless other configurations. A soft breeze was rusling the dry leaves still clinging stubbornly to the trees and sighing through the pines. It started getting a little too cool to be comfortable so we went inside and started another fire, drank hot chocolate and talked for a long while. We played around and got silly in the shower.
Thursday morning I cooked breakfast again, we made sure all the dishes were washed, dried and put away, then cleaned up everything. I cleaned the fireplace and grill, took out the trash, and we sadly left on the long, nine hour drive back home. Our sweet time over and done and looking forward to next year.
Rett