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2003-08-14 - 4:02 p.m.

The Brew Crew ladies are more than sun and water bunnies. We also take road trips.

Road trip, however, may be a misnomer for our jaunts. Typically, we don’t take major highways or state roads; we meander around on hilly, twisting county roads. Roads with names like: Billy’s Path, Lariat Trail, Old School Road and Pure Air Trail. Roads not appearing on maps and that are more cow path than roadway, which is why we usually end up lost!

We recently heard of a Field of Purple, acres and acres of Liatris (Blazing Star), about 15 miles from here—way the hell out in the boonies. Yesterday we decided we had to see this purple field, so we loaded up the cooler and camera and—without a clue as to where we were going—headed west. We stopped at a country store in the area near where we thought the flowers were and hit pay dirt. The kid knew of the place and gave us directions:

“Take Route O quite a ways up to the cement bridge, turn on Burrows Path, then take the tractor path past the first bean field.”

Yep, we knew exactly where to go.

Quite a ways up Route O we found Burrows Path, a rutted gravel lane twisting down through the hills to the river bottom. Past the first bean field we saw the tractor path, and concealed far back near the trees we saw purple spikes.

The concealed location bothered me. “Field of flowers my behind, we’re headed into a well hidden marijuana crop!”

SueSue, always the road trip captain, assured me we would only get shot if we were invading someone’s meth lab. “You see some ole boy with an Igloo jug and shotgun, put the pedal to the floor in this Jeep!”

So down the path we went, bumping and bouncing, winding through the bean field and across a dry creek bed. And the flowers were beautiful.

Finding this field made us Lewis and Clark. Brave explorers. Or fools with a cooler of cold beer.

We were off to another field of wildflowers someone had told SueSue about. This one proved harder to find. All she knew was we were to take some blacktop south to “some cemetery” then down a rock road. A rock road with a bridge out. After driving south for miles on a blacktop, we decided we had the wrong blacktop so we backtracked until we found another blacktop road. This blacktop led us to Pure Air Trail, and Pure Air rang a bell with SueSue. Mile after mile after mile along the gravel trail; I began scouting for the Kickapoo Indians who used to roam the hills in northern Missouri. We hadn’t been shot at a meth lab earlier, but I was sure we would be scalped in this frontier land.

Deep into the boondocks, just when I was certain we were headed for a Deliverance experience, we rounded a corner and drove into a burro ranch.

The burros were friendly and enjoyed having their picture taken. But we had a problem: we had no idea where we were. After hours of winding and bouncing around narrow county roads, we finally found the highway home.

Fall is a great time to explore the backwoods of Missouri, and I suspect we’ll get lost God knows where again before the snow falls.

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