2024 Dying Leaf Ride

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From Rick Butler:

Thu Oct 24th 

Depart from the Race Trac in Wylie at 8:00. It’s going to be 385 miles to  Clinton, AR so we are going to take the most direct route through Broken Bow, OK where we  will have lunch at the Ranch House Café in De Queen, AR. My route shows we should arrive around 5:30.  

We will be staying 3 nights at the Quality Inn where I have 10 double bed rooms blocked in my  name. We already have 5 of us with room reservations using the AARP rate, which are  running around $95 a night or less. The best option I know of is going through ChoiceHotels.com and making an online reservation for Oct 24th – 27th using the AARP rate. 

Fri Oct 25th 

We will be taking a 316 mi route where our first stop will be what we used to call the White  River Overlook that we have been going to for around 20 years. But now we discover it has an  official name “City Rock Bluff ''. From highway 5 it’s 2.5 miles of unpaved road to this rock cliff  overlooking the White River. But from there we have two options to get to Push Mountain Rd, one another 9 miles of unpaved road to connect to the north end of Push Mountain or… take the  2.5 miles back to Hwy 5 through Calico Rock to the north end of Hwy 341 (Push Mountain Rd)  to meet the off road group at the 341 Market 6 mi south of the start of Highway 341 which will  be a butt break with the option to top off with gas. From there we will travel south and west to  Leslie where we will have lunch at Ryan’s Bar and Grill with a gas stop and then continue to the  intersection of Hwy 7 and 16 to the old country store at Sand Gap where we will stop for a  moment. This is the start of the lower section of one of our favorite roads, AR 123, that we will  take to Hagarsville to turn south and east back to Clinton on some great roads. 

Sat Oct 26th 

This day we will basically take AR 16 west pretty much all the way to the Pig Trail AR 23 before  turning north and east to Kingston and AR 21, 43 and 74 to Jasper. AR 43 is where there is an  elk watching station pull out in Boxley Valley. We will have lunch at the new location of the Low Gap Café in Jasper before going east and south to the upper section of AR 123 to Pelsor,  where we will head east on AR 16 back to Clinton.  300 miles for the day.

Sun Oct 27th 

This is when we head for home where we will pretty much take the same route we took coming up  where we can only cross the Arkansas River at Morrilton. But when we get to Rover, we will  continue west, but not going to Mena, but run on US 270 west to US 259 to connect with the west  end of the Talimena Trail into Talihina for lunch at a nice Mexican restaurant (El Rancho Mexican Grill) that Mark found on our After Tax ride to Arkansas earlier this year. Then it’s back to Texas crossing the Red River north of Paris to our homes via an option of roads. The  route shows 406 miles and gets us back to Wylie by 4:30.

Total Route Miles:  1,407