Not the sign itself, but the name of the church. That has to be the funniest name for a church I've ever seen... apparently it's in flippin' Arkansas... uh, I mean, Flippin, Arkansas. Which also happens to be the best name for a town in Arkansas that I've ever heard. I mean, have you ever BEEN to flippin' Arkansas? The flippin' roads are a mess, the flippin' people have never heard of hot tea (true story), the flippin' average IQ seems to hover somewhere around 80... (Gosh, I'm being really mean to Arkansas... I hope no one from Arkansas is reading this blog... of course, now I've mentioned "Arkansas" so many times that no doubt my blog will pop up on some Google search results list for "people who hate Arkansas.") I'm kidding -- Arkansas is great... they have, um... the Ozarks. Yeah. In fact, I often buy Ozarka bottled water, which comes straight from... oh, how weird. Ozarka water comes from Texas. By way of Connecticut. Alrighty then...
To be fair, it was only ONE, or maybe two or three, people in Arkansas who didn't know how to make hot tea. We were driving through on our way to Austin, and stopped at a McDonald's for breakfast. My mom isn't much of a coffee person, so she asked for a hot tea. And I've never seen such a simple request completely befuddle human beings in my life. They dazedly told my mom that they had ICED tea, but weren't so sure about hot tea. At which point, the conversation went something like this:
Mom: Do you have tea bags?
Tea-challenged person (holding up bag of Lipton): Yes.
Mom: And do you have hot water?
Tea-challenged person: Yes.
Mom: Well, there ya go then.
This was also the same McDonald's where, as we sat down to enjoy our breakfast and miraculously-produced hot tea, someone came in and asked who was driving whichever make and model of car we had at the time. When we said it was ours, they told us we had to move our car so they could get to the dumpster. And we were not, by the way, just parked willy-nilly in front of the dumpster -- we were parked in a proper, marked parking space which our car had every right to occupy. (Hey, how about YOU wait until the restaurant patrons are finished, and THEN do whatever you need to do with the dumpster?? You don't just order customers to move their cars so you can save a few minutes of time...)
Rick and I have also had many an Arkansas-related complaint -- mostly because of the horrible, ridiculously bumpy roads (which, to their credit, they finally began to repave several years ago... maybe they're done and FINALLY smooth by now...). The one thing that sticks out in my mind is our stay in a Little Rock hotel where housekeeping tried to get into our room at 7 am. Fortunately, I always make sure the little latch-thingy is secured, so even though they were able to unlock the door, they could only open it a few inches. But that, plus several more run-ins with rude/unknowledgeable/just plain strange residents, convinced us to always get through Arkansas as quickly as possible.
Maybe it's just the nature of interstate travel... or maybe it's just flippin' Arkansas...
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