Making Our Way To Austin Texas.......

During our stay in Memphis we took a day to drive up to Wilson Arkansas.  Why Wilson you ask....???? Well, our friend Gary, from Nashville, is involved with this town being renovated and rejuvenated.  The town of Wilson, and surrounding 65,000 acres, was recently purchased by Gaylon Lawrence for a mere $150 million.  There is a whole lot of history about this town of Wilson, and Lee Wilson & Company, one of the oldest family-owned businesses in Arkansas.  If you are interested, you can check out the link below for more information:

http://www.arkansasbusiness.com/article/34051/150-million-sale-brings-an-end-to-wilson-empire?page=all

There are cotton fields forever in this area, and we were invited to visit a Cotton Gin.  We have been wondering what they do with all that cotton, and how was it cleaned and processed after picking.  From what we hear, this Cotton Gin is one of the most modern in the country.  Pretty much totally computerized, and the management likes to see people just standing around, which tells them everything is working fine.

The white is cotton being fed through machines that separates the husks and seeds, then it is sent to another machine below, to compress it into 500 pound bales for shipping.

The seed is very high in protein, and is used for cow feed.  The cotton seed is transported via air tubes and stored for resale.  The bottom right picture shows three 500 lb bales waiting to be loaded in a waiting truck.

We were taken on a personal guided tour, behind the scenes of this little town of Wilson, and shown plans of upcoming town improvements.  If our travels take us back this way we will return to see how it turns out.

Our daughter, Andrea, asked if we were in the area of Tishomingo Oklahoma, could we stop at the "Pink Pistol" to pick her up a T-Shirt.  For all you Country Music people out there, Miranda Lambert and Blake Shelton live in Tishomingo Oklahoma, and Miranda has opened her second Pink Pistol store here.  Her first store was opened a few years ago in her home town of Lindale Texas.  This year was her second annual "Pink Friday" celebration, the day after Thanksgiving.  Main Street Tishomingo was blocked off, where there were Bands playing, vendors selling their wares, and a two hour line to get into Miranda's store.

Everything in the town was decorated in PINK, for Pink Friday, even Santa, and a few other children characters that were roaming around.  Pink was definitely the color of the day.  We didn't find Blake or Miranda, but the weather was nice, we had a Great Day and we found a couple of T-Shirt.

One corner of the store was dedicated to "SHIT", where we had a hard time trying to figure out what to purchase.  We figured Blake had something to do with this corner of the store., and we decided to leave this Shit alone, since we already have enough Shit.

Neil McCoy was scheduled to perform at 8PM, but since the nights have been getting down right COLD, and we had an hour drive back to our wheelhouse, in the dark, we decided to skip the show and head home.

Tomorrow we travel South toward Austin.  Hopefully we will find warmer weather so we can work on our winter tans.  We fly home on the 11th for Christmas and will return January 8th.  We are looking forward to spending the Holidays with all of our family and friends, and enjoying some good old fashion Northwest weather.

Thanks for looking in on us, and we will continue our adventure after the first of the year.

Hope you have a Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year,

Steve and Roberta