I drove to Arkansas the week before last to spend some time with my Mom. We enjoyed a few days together, telling the old stories on her back porch, playing cribbage at her dinner table, going out to eat, and watching old episodes of “Seinfeld” in the evening before bedtime.

It takes about twelve hours to drive between our house in Wisconsin and Mom’s place in Arkansas. If you ask Google maps to show you the trip, it will tell you it’s only 9 hours 30 minutes, but of course that’s if you drive it straight through, no stops. I try to knock at least two hours off the drive at a time, then stop for at least 10 or 15 minutes to take a break, get some air, and walk at least some of the soreness out of my butt.

My last rest stop on the way back was Funk’s Grove IL, just south of Bloomington. The first sign alerting drivers to this rest stop had a big orange “CLOSED” sign slapped on it, a huge bummer for me because I really needed to get out of the car by then. Luckily, the next sign was more informative: “REST STOP OPEN – BATHROOMS CLOSED.” Not a problem for me, I didn’t feel the need to go. The sign at the off-ramp had the same info, and a temporary sign at the entrance to the parking lot also warned that bathrooms were closed. In the parking lot, there were several more bright orange pop-up signs along the walkways warning everyone the bathrooms were closed.

NEVERTHELESS! While I was there, I saw maybe a half-dozen people get out of their cars and head straight for the bathrooms in a hurry, only to throw up their hands in exasperation when they pulled on the door handles (signs in the windows: “TEMPORARILY CLOSED – SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE”) and found the doors locked. People confound me sometimes.

More than a few of those people wandered off into the trees that bordered the park. That grove was going to be funky for more reasons that the people who originally named it thought it would be.