Wild Hogs - Arkansas Style

With very little planning other than a desire to go, my friend Louis, my brother-in-law Gary and I fired up on a rather cool Sunday morning headed up to check out the leaves in the Ozark and Ouachita Mountains in western Arkansas.

The players

Louis

Gary

 Yours Truly

I know, don't even start.  Louisiana is a beautiful state in it's own right but hey, it was October and we are not known for our four seasons.  We have the hot humid season and the not so hot humid season.  With that in mind, we figured we would put at least 400 miles on us the first day to get into curvy roads and into the hill country.  

As we began on Highway 7 in southern Arkansas the colors began to spring forth in a way we had not seen at home.  Highway 7 is a well known crooked little pig trail and following the Ouachita River north and was an adventure itself.

Reaching Hot Springs in mid afternoon, we found the city over run with hillbillies coming out of the woods to participate in a downtown Halloween fest.

Monday morning, we waited until an enormous fog burned off.  By 8:30 we were continuing on Hwy 7 toward the mountains.   The colors were even more vivid and somehow managed to distract our attention away from the endless collections of old camper trailers, abandoned refrigerators and old rusty Fords that had not moved in 40 years.  Somehow, the odor of the ever present chicken houses were not that bad.

Being a Monday, traffic was at a minimum and having to pass motor homes was not much of an issue even as we began to ascend Mt Magazine and Petit Jean Mountain.

While it was exciting taking the curves, hills and switchbacks, it was a lot of work that would later prove to be the source of sore shoulders and backs.  Imagine riding a beast 4 times as heavy as you are and guiding that thing by pulling on one horn and pushing on the other while clamping your legs around it's neck.  Nevertheless, I would and will gladly do it again.

Monday night, we found a hotel in Arkadelphia and turned in early.  The next morning, cold again, we rode down to the Waffle House to continue our quest to over-eat.  As we rode up, there was a dual sport motorcycle already parked there.  A "dual sport" is a bike that is basically a street legal dirt bike.  Finding the owner already in there, I engaged him in conversation and found he was from Illinois, had been on the road since June and had been to Alaska already this year. "Mark from Illinois" said he would probably go to the Gulf of Mexico then head back for home.  He said he just didn't like riding in the snow.  I can only imagine.

By the time we had arrived back home in South Louisiana, we had put just over a thousand miles on our bikes.

I say, it was a good trip that cleared my head of a lot of junk and will look forward to another "Wild Hogs Adventure" in the future.