Weekend in Mena

We took a little trip down to Mena this weekend. We wanted to go down and see all the tornado damage and see our friends. It is amazing how much damage the tornado did. There are so many houses and businesses that were damaged and destroyed. And there is debris everywhere. The really sad thing is where it hit is the older part of town and a lot of the people there did not have house insurance. We heard one figure that 35% of the damaged houses did not have insurance. Most of the people in that area are older and retired and don't have the money to tear down the old house and build a new one. So, it remains to be seen what is going to happen to all those people and all those houses. We really feel bad for all the people there. We did not take any pictures of any of the damage partly because there are so many pictures already on the internet and I felt bad taking pictures of people's damaged lives and them trying to clean up. I really hope that the town is able to recover and not become a ghost town because I really like Mena, it is such a nice place.
On a happier note, we were able to see several friends while we were down there which was nice. We stayed with some really good friends and had an awesome time with them. We took a drive on Saturday night in one of their old cars up on Rich Mountain (second tallest mountain in Arkansas) to Queen Wilhelmina Lodge and had coffee. I was a really pleasant and relaxing drive, I really enjoyed it. We took some pics of us with the cool car before we left that I thought I would post.