Colorado to Texas via Missouri and Oklahoma

A stop in Missouri to visit family and friends was a welcome break after the long drive from Colorado (last hour or so into Kansas City in the pouring rain!!). After a brief visit with Missey we made the short drive to Lebanon to see James, Chery and our Lebanon friends. We stayed with Nancy at the Baptist Camp again and the Laclede Baptist Assoc men were having a gigging and fish fry. Since James had never even heard of gigging much less done any, it was a great opportunity for him to experience one of the truly redneck pastimes.





Here the boats are ready to go and James joins the other men for an hour or so of 'spearing the fish'.



Meanwhile I served as driver to transport the vehicles to where they would take out after the float and helped get things started for the fish fry. Several of the men provided fish from other trips (both gigging and fishing) so we had plenty of insurance in case it was a bad night for gigging (and allowed us to get a head start on the eating part of the night).




We managed to just barely keep fish coming out of the fryer as fast as the hungry men could down them. A generator and propane fryers sure were a far cry from my youth days when we had to rely on carbide lights and charcoal!


The men doing the gigging finally made it and we had managed to save them a few fish so they could eat before starting to clean the fish they had gigged. Everyone pitched in for the cleaning and they soon had the 100 or so fish cleaned and ready for the freezers.




Traveling down to visit Sue and Charles in Oklahoma we stayed on a lake we had visited before and found this camp getting ready for the goblins - even though it was more than a week away!


















Fall was definitely on its way as you can see from this shot.



















Along the way I found these two trees. Not much to say about a tree but, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Here are a couple of thousand words. No extra charge for the bicycle!