Small town adventures

Yesterday me, some girls from work, a few of their husbands(the ones not studying for the med school boards) and Dan, trekked out on a great adventure in Northeast Missouri, hitting the "must see spots" of the locals. Two of the girls from work are leaving in July(sad, verry verry sad) so their husbands can continue pursuing some degree(seriously, they don't need them!). Anyways, so we wanted to have a little adventure before they left. The first picture you see is a picture of the Rutledge Dog and gun show. I guess back in the day, they used to mostly just sell, you guess it, dogs and guns. However that is not the case now and it has grown into quite a spectacle. We were worried because the guys drove off in one car and raced ahead and we ended up losing them. In the age of cell phones, neither of them had theirs on them. We decided that we four girls could handle the crickers and scary people and hoped that the boys knew we had to meet them at our next destination by 1. Let me paint you a picture of what this was like. 3 city girls, one who is pregnant, 1 girl raised in rural america, all of us walking through vendors who are selling things from guns to dog collars to junk that looks like it came out of their trash can. We are heading to the "timber" to find the animals among which they also sell kittens, chickens, roosters, goats, birds, etc. In my head i am remembering Dan telling me how they moved most of the sale OUT of the timber because too many people were getting raped or attacked. . .But we march on like the brave city girls we are, cursing the guys for abandoning us while trying to take in the "culture" around us. In the "timber" we saw lots of animals, including our guys. Dan said that he knew that if they would me anywhere it would be where the animals were. Very true. Props to him. But i diverge. So we gave the boys a cell phone and split up again, agreeing to meet at our next destination at 1. Well we decided that the bloomin onions smelled too good to pass up and hey, our pregnant lady wanted them and who are we to deny her? So we ate bloomin onions, waited in line 20 minutes for famous limeades only to find out they were out of sugar water(what?i know) and thenhad to drive to our next destinations with verbal directions that sounded like this:" Take a right out of the first entrance of the flea market, go through Rutledge, past the Mennonite store, up a hill and around another curve. You'll come to a T in the road, take a right. Go about 200 yards and turn left on a blacktop, take that around till a gravel road..." you get the picture. With those directions, who wouldn't get lost!? we were actually very close and a nice mennonite woman kindly pointed out the way as i was standing on her front porch.
The second picture yo u see is of our second adventure, Dancing Rabbits. Wow, if you have never seen it, ya should. It is an eco-village, where everything is made from recycled things or earth. Rumor has it that they run around naked and smoke pot, neither of which i doubt. Some of their ideas are good, some a little raddical, and others just downright crazy. Most of their houses are made from straw bales, some reinforced with lime plaster. They have co-ops for EVERYTHING. if you want to use an indoor toilet(which by the way is just a hole with a bucket underneath, which you then have to clean out) you have to pay to be apart of the co-op. They have food co-ops, phone co-ops, computer co-ops, any kind you can imagine. I did find it a little funny that they didn't condone the idea of running water or toilets but most every hut was equipped with high speed internet....check out their website for more pics and ideals they hold. www.dancingrabbit.org
So that was quite an experience and we were ready to book it out of theree before they served us the kool-aid:) Our next and final stop on the trip was to the Mennonite store(remember the one we passed on our way to dancing rabbits?) . This was where we found the best homemade doughnuts I've ever had. They have homemade everything there! After that we headed back to one of the girls house for a bbq and debriefing about our adventures. It was quite a day in rural america but one that will definitely go down in the memory books!