~ Lookin for Love in Arkansas ~

I spent the past week(ish) with Josh's family in Bentonville, Arkansas. As far as visiting the family of one's partner in Arkansas goes, it was a decent trip. We spent much of the time at various family gatherings. The main downers for me included my inability to sleep at night and continued stomach distress (which I wrote about in my previous post). Most of the family gatherings revolved around the consumption of heavy foods. Because of my weakened digestive abilities and nonexistent appetite, I limited myself to small portions. But I did enjoy what I was able to eat. In addition to food, the family gatherings also tended to focus on cooing over the newborn baby, Josh's niece, and playing games. Below are a few adventures of the trip. Incidentally, the photo below is during the family bowling night, and Josh, his dad, brother Seth, and niece Ely imitating the expressions of the baby.

Josh and I maintained our sanity in Arkansas, wherein the population is considerably more religious and less physically active than we're used to, by enjoying some morning coffees and going on walks and hikes. One route we hiked a few times took us along a bit of actual nature, where there were thick vines hanging from the trees. Below, Josh practices his Tarzan.

One adventure was Saturday night karaoke at a local biker bar. The only beer served on tap was Budweiser, of which I had several in addition to a few tequila shots. Josh and I sang "Proud Mary" karaoke, danced and had a lot of fun. I shot several videos of the karaoke, as I found it culturally different than Boise, in a country-western sense. I was pretty toasted by the time that I filmed this video, as evidenced by my failure to keep the camera steady.

Another adventure occurred on Tuesday, when I went along with Josh, his mom and his brother Seth to visit the Pea Ridge National Military Park, which is a civil war historical site. At the visitor's center, we watched an interesting documentary about the battle site and then we took a driving tour to the various points of interest.

While we were headed out to the Pea Ridge site, we saw an interesting piece of property that was littered with old vehicles. One caught our eye; an old Model T with a tree growing out of it. Pretty cool.

That evening, the entire family gathered for a few games of bowling. I bowled my finest game, with a score of 114.

The final adventure of the trip was to visit the Walmart museum where we learned all about the rise of the Walton family and learned the secrets to Walmart's success. I found it to be a one-sided and biased interpretation of history and success, but it was nonetheless interesting. A few days earlier, I had lunch at a Walmart Distribution Center (a big warehouse that serves as a hub for the trucking distribution of goods, that houses enough goods to fill ten entire Walmart stores) where Josh's brother Jim works. This was also an interesting experience - - we had to go through security, were assigned "visitor" name badges, and were not allowed to take photos inside the building. Below is a photo of Josh, brother Seth, and mom Kathy on the outside.

More photos on my photoset.

Posted by jennifer at 11:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)