Johnson's Shut Ins

We are at the Shut Ins. Glad we stuck around and tried out the rougher stretch of water lagoons. What it is is numerous volcanic bolders with a river flowing fast thru it. There are rapid-like areas over smooth rocks and a hell of a tide pool that, if u weren't an ok swimmer, you could possibly freak out and be in trouble. We went thru that twice. That is the type of thing I enjoy about Missouri's red state feel. Here, for example, no park ranger is anywhere around monitoring this shit. With this, the City Museum and a dozen other places, it's like, risk your life, we won't even post signs, cliff dive here, it may be deep enough, climb thru 3 stories of wrought iron tunnels, hope you don't scare easy. Maybe you'll die, maybe you won't, maybe you'll sue us, maybe not. Who gives a damn...

On the way to and from the park, we saw tons of roadkill, mostly armadillos. It was like an apocalypse. The only time I've seen more dead armadillos is when we were moving to Michigan from Los Angeles via interviews in Mississippi and St. Louis and we went to that public diamond mine in Arkansas on the way. Megan slept and from the Oklahoma line into Arkansas, I must have seen 50 dead armadillos and they were all jet black. They might have been a bad omen, because they didn't get to ring that bell and call out our names on the megaphone at the mine like we might have wanted. I saw the other day that someone found a 3 carat diamond there recently. Sons of bitches...