– Friday –
Denton, Texas to Fort Smith, Arkansas
As many of you know, Mark plays for the Fort Smith Symphony in Arkansas. This weekend, the season began with a concert called The Greatest Generation, which was meant to commemorate World War II. Since we needed to be in Fort Smith anyway for the symphony, we decided to tack on a trip to Hot Springs National Park, which was one of only five national parks we were missing in the continental United States. I’m not sure exactly why we’ve missed one that’s so close to us, but I guess it never seemed like the right time to visit. We’re missing Big Bend, too. Sometimes the ones that aren’t as close are easier to plan trips to, I guess.
We started our trip on Friday around noon, already armed with the somewhat alarming knowledge that our hotel (the same hotel that the symphony books for the musicians for every concert) had lost its boiler in some dramatic incident that morning and we now had no idea where we were staying. We were supposed to drive to the hotel and from there, they would tell us what other hotel we were booked in for the night. I fretted a little, but it didn’t turn out too bad.
On our drive, we read Sabriel, which we nearly finished. Ripley rode in the back of the Xterra in her crate, which is unusual for her, but with Mark’s bass in the car, it is the only way she fits. Someday, when we replace our current vehicle, we will show up at a car dealership with a bass and a dog crate to see if they fit before we buy a new car. I kid you not, that is what we plan to do. The poor salesperson will probably think we are insane.
When we arrived at the Executive Inn, where the boiler had exploded, we were directed to our hotel for the night, which was actually the Hampton Inn, which was fantastic for us. The pet fee was the same and we love Hampton Inns, although they are usually a little more expensive than we like. Of course, in this case it was free, so we certainly didn’t complain. We were running a little late, so Mark had to rush off to symphony practice for a quick dinner with the other musicians after we unloaded the car. Ripley and I headed up to the hotel room and ordered some pizza. She didn’t get any, but I promise she enjoyed the finest kibbles on the premises.
– Saturday –
Fort Smith, Arkansas
Concert weekends are interesting. Mark has practice on Friday from 6:30-10pm and on Saturday from 10:30am-2pm. The concert itself is Saturday night at 7:30, although Mark is supposed to arrive at 7pm. I tell you all of this so you can understand how we have to structure our days in Fort Smith. If I didn’t explain, our movements would seem a little odd, I think.
On Saturday, we got out of bed at 7am. Since we were in a hotel room across town from our usual location, we had to choose a new running spot to get our exercise. It was much too far to drive across town to our regular park. We picked a trail over by the Fort Smith dog park and the airport. It ended up being a neat little spot, paved, and nice and long. We saw other bikers and joggers, and while it was a little cold back in the trees, we were pretty happy overall with our choice. I think we will go back in the future on the days that we have time to drive over to it. It’s at least 15 minutes from our regular hotel.
We had breakfast at the Hampton Inn in our running clothes after we dropped Ripley off at our room because we were afraid they’d close up shop before we made it back downstairs. I thought we’d stand out in our still-slightly-sweaty running gear, but we were surrounded by university volleyball players, so we fit right in. Man, some of those girls could really put away the food. I guess they were planning to work it off at a tournament later in the day. Once we’d eaten, we went back up to the room to shower and feed Ripley, who was very sleepy from all of her exercise.
We hung out in the hotel room until just after 10am, when Mark needed to be across town for another symphony practice. Ripley and I dropped him off and drove all the way back to the Fort Smith Dog Park. The dog park is a huge, wooded area with a large pond . The whole thing is enclosed by tall chain-link fence. We love it there. Ever since this spring, when Ripley discovered the pond wasn’t so bad, she’d had the time of her life swimming and searching through the park for interesting sights and smells. In fact, one of my favorite Ripley pictures is from this particular dog park.
On Saturday, she decided that she was really feeling like a hunting dog. It started out with the little minnows that she could see in the shallows of the pond. She chased those until a frog jumped, and then, for the next hour and a half, she hunted frogs all around one side of the pond. I chatted with the other dog owners while she dove in and out of weeds and sniffed muddy holes, tail wagging and butt high in the air. It was hilarious to watch her go. By the end, she was absolutely covered in mud and had to have a quick shower with the hose before she could even think about getting back in the car.
Post dog park, I needed another shower (as I was covered in mud from my dear, sweet canine friend), so we headed back to the hotel. It was already nearly 1pm, so after my shower I got dressed again and took Ripley to PetSmart to look at toys and treats and to kill some time. We visited with all of the employees at the Petsmart since everyone wants to pet her, and she was probably given a dozen treats, all told. In fact, I had a hard time getting her away from the cashiers so we could go pick up Mark. We ended up being 5 minutes late.
Mark and I dropped Ripley back at the hotel to take a nap after her exciting morning and went out to piddle around Ft. Smith. Mark bought a new camera lens from a guy on Craigslist, and we had some cheese fries, which I don’t recommend. Neither of us came away from that feeling great. We had Greek salads for dinner and took cupcakes back to the hotel to have after the concert. The cupcake bakery in Fort Smith even makes little cupcakes for dogs, so Ripley got one as well.
I meant to snap a picture of the symphony, but I’m always a little embarrassed and unsure when the right moment would be. You really shouldn’t do that sort of thing during a concert, but I could’ve done it when everyone was coming back from intermission or just before the concert started. Unfortunately I never really worked up the courage to stand up and snap the picture. It seemed so awkward. Mark assures me it isn’t, but he isn’t the one that would be doing it. Regardless, it was over by 9:30 and we were back in our hotel room to have milk and cupcakes. Ripley basically ate hers whole, despite my efforts to make her eat it in several bites. At least she was happy? And it didn’t come back up.
– Sunday –
Fort Smith, Arkansas to Hot Springs, Arkansas
We got up at 8am on Sunday morning intending to go run, but Mark’s foot was bothering him, so we decided instead to pack up and head on ahead to Hot Springs. It’s about a 2.5 hour drive and we left around 10, so with stops and such, we made it to Hot Springs around 1pm. It’s a pretty drive. The trees are starting to turn colors for fall in the area, and the roads wind through a lot of park-type land. It is mostly pretty remote, save for a few smallish places. We finished our book on the drive, but I didn’t get to start the next one we brought. The roads started to wind through the mountains rather sharply towards the end of the drive, and I am definitely prone to motion sickness.
Hot Springs is an adorable little town, and it sprawls for miles through the area down two main streets. The national park is downtown, where all of the older buildings are. Our hotel turned out to be on the far end of Hot Springs, just before you reach Lake Hamilton. We had a free night at the La Quinta there, which was a fantastic little hotel. We had a suite, which we enjoyed immensely. They checked us in early, too, so we were able to get Mark’s bass out of the heat of the car so we could explore the town.
The first thing we needed was lunch, and we ended up just grabbing a quick sandwich at Jimmy John’s to save ourselves some time. Now that it is getting dark earlier in the day, we didn’t want to risk running out of time to look around the town in the evening because we had spent too much time getting lunch at a local restaurant. We figured we could have something that was a bit more special for our dinner.
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Most of the national park is made up of the bathhouses on Bathhouse Row in downtown Hot Springs. The national park visitor center, as well as the gift shop, are located in two defunct bathhouses. Only two of the bathhouses are currently in operation as actual bathhouses, and only the QuaPaw Baths was open Sunday. Several of the other bathhouses are being renovated to serve as national park buildings. One has even been made into a brewery and bar.
Bathhouse Row is neat, and the walkway along the road is lined with lovely shade trees. There’s several places where they’ve preserved greenspace for people to use. We saw people throwing frisbees for their dogs and sitting in the grass downtown. That being said, Hot Springs also has quite a few abandoned businesses and buildings. Around the same time the bathhouses started going out of business, the sprawling, historic hotels that had housed the bathhouses’ tourists for years started going out of business. I have never seen so many abandoned buildings of that size in any other town. One of the buildings even had a sign in the window begging voters to save the town’s history. I’m not really sure what they expect anyone to do with a building like that. As it stands, it’s an eyesore, and renovating it would be a nightmare. Retrofitting a building that’s that large and that old… you’d never get your money back.
After walking the drag, we stopped in the visitor center and took some photographs of the old bathhouse equipment inside. I’ll be honest with you, out of context, it almost looks like a roomful of torture devices. I guess, at the time they were built, it was meant more for health than for relaxation, so it makes sense that it would look more like a hospital than a spa. Still, none of it seemed very inviting. Maybe it was a more welcome sight back in its heyday.
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Aside from the bathhouses, little springs peek out of corners just behind the buildings on Bathhouse Row. Mark, Ripley, and I checked out several of these when we finished looking at the buildings. The water is exactly as hot as you’d think it would be. Ripley tried to drink it despite my repeated warnings and all of my attempts to keep her nose out of it. She didn’t try again, oddly enough. I don’t think she hurt herself, but she certainly learned her lesson. She was very popular with all of the other people hanging around on their lazy Sunday afternoon. She met a lot of children, too. Everyone wanted to talk about her and pet her. She’s a sweetheart, but it can be a little embarrassing when people want to pet her and she ducks her head away from them or hides. She doesn’t do it all the time, and I don’t think she hid from any of the children. SHe must have discerning tastes.
Up in the hills behind the bathhouses are several trails and big brick walkway that leads past a few more openings for the springs and several trapdoors where the water is tested. You can look down on the town from this vantage, and the old advertisements that are still painted on the buildings are amusing to see, especially since most of them advertise that things can be purchased for a nickel or a dime.
A lot of the springs have pennies tossed in them, which really irks me. What is it about holes with water in them that makes people want to toss money? One particular spring had pennies wedged into the rock formations where they’d been trapped in sedimentary buildup from the spring. Why does anyone think that’s a good idea? Either the pennies remain there and ruin the natural view for someone else, or a park ranger or someone similar has to remove them. It is irresponsible and inconsiderate and damages the features of the spring/pool/fountain/whatever. PSA: Don’t try to toss coins into anything but a wishing well on Kristy’s watch, or she will kick your butt.
When we finished wandering around downtown, we got back into the Xterra and headed up to the top of Hot Springs Mountain to look out over the area. The mountaintop is a spectacular vantage point for viewing the surrounding forest. It’s really a gorgeous place, though it can sometimes be difficult to think of it that way when you see it all of the time. It’s like that for me with Fort Smith and Arkansas in general. It is so familiar that I frequently forget how picturesque it really is. Fall hasn’t left much of a mark yet, but we did see a few areas where the leaves had started to blush from the arrival of autumn. It’s only a matter of time.
There’s a tower on the mountain where you can climb or ride to the top to get an even better view, but we chose not to do it. It wasn’t the price (which is $7) that was the problem. You see, they have stairs. And they are outside. But little Ripley was not allowed on the stairs. So we did not go. In fact, the fellow that worked at the Hot Springs Mountain Tower was terribly rude to us when we even asked (and when Mark asked to get change for a pressed penny). So, random worker who will almost certainly never see this, hmph. Jerk.
We went back to our hotel for a bit from the mountain drive, but we didn’t stay there for long. Instead, we did some research about the local dog park went back out with Ripley. We took a last stroll around the downtown area of the national park, where we searched for a candy shop we’d seen in hopes of buying some chocolate for a snack. Unfortunately, our plans were thwarted because the shop had closed early. It seems like that happens all too often on Sundays.
Ripley had to wear her face harness for this particular walk, and she is not very fond of it. She had been pulling as hard as she could on the leash all day, no matter which body harness I used, so I switched her over to the face harness. She immediately became convinced that she was being murdered, and she behaved about as dramatically as you might expect for a dog that things her life is over. She tried to rub the harness off of her face in the grass, which was amusing, but ultimately didn’t do anything for her. Poor, unfortunate soul.
To make up for being such horribly cruel parents, we took her to the dog park, where she continued to behave like a child and hid from the other dogs and generally acted like a scaredy-cat. She’s often quite reticent, but she was especially unfriendly on Sunday. When we managed to get her away from the other dogs into her own corner, she ran around in deliriously happy circles and generally made a fool of herself. She’s a weird little thing, there’s no doubt.
Since it was getting late, we went back to the hotel one last time and dropped Ripley off. We needed food and she seemed ready for a nap. We drove back to downtown Hot Springs, where we stopped at Rolando’s for our dinner. Rolando’s is technically Ecuadorian food, from what I understand. Mark and I ordered a dish that was mostly rice and beans, but it was topped with pickled cucumbers and onions. I am not sure if that particular dish is considered Ecuadorian, since it is rumored to have been the favorite of Fidel Castro, who is of course, Cuban.
After dinner, we retreated to our hotel to rest and play on the internet for the rest of the evening. It was the last night of our trip, so we planned to spend the morning in Hot Springs and be out of our hotel with Mark’s bass before checkout time at 12:00pm.
– Monday –
Hot Springs, Arkansas to Denton, Texas
Monday morning began at 7am at the dog park in Hot Springs. A running trail went right past the park, and the three of us did about 3.5 miles before calling it a day and taking little Ripley back over to the dog park for a quick romp and a game of fetch. Some of the asphalt (really, portions of the trail) were brand new, and it made our shoes stick to the pavement as we ran. The sticking made hilarious thunking sounds. It’s really weird to feel like your shoes are gripping the ground while you run.
We were out for a long time on Monday morning, so when we finished up, we had to rush back to the hotel for our showers. We still wanted to go out to breakfast, and checkout was at 12pm.
We ended up eating at The Pancake Shop. It was a local restaurant only one door down from Rolando’s. The restuarant had been around for a very long time, according to the menu. Since at least the 1930’s, if I recall correctly. Mark had an omelette and toast and I ordered pancakes. He told me to get 3 pancakes, since he wanted some too. It really turned out that we should’ve only gotten 2. They were so massive that by the time both of us were finished, there was still at least one pancake left on the plate. The food was good and the staff seemed very friendly, so if we ever visit again, I think we’ll go back. Mark’s omelette had a little more cheese than he was prepared for, but he survived. I don’t think I’ve ever seen quite so much cheese folded inside one omelette before.
When we finished breakfast, we still had a little time, so we ran to the national park’s gift shop to buy some stickers and look at the T-shirts. We’d seen the shop the day before, but with Ripley, we had to go inside one at a time. We never do very well when we try to do things that way. They didn’t have our favorite kind of national park sticker, but not all of them do. It seems that mostly the larger parks have the cooler-looking stickers, which I guess makes sense. We made do with what they had.
From there, we stopped at a filling station to load up on water from the springs. It seems to be a big deal, because we saw a bunch of people (especially locals) filling up huge jugs of water to take with them. The national park is very careful to say that while the water is potable, they do not claim that it has any of the curative properties that have been claimed in the town’s history. It is just clean, fresh, spring water. You can get it hot or cold from several fountains around town. Most of the shops sell souvenir bottles, too. Mark and I just used two leftover Aquafina bottles from our drive the day before. We’re classy that way. The water tastes more like water from my parents’ farm than water from the tap in Denton, but it really isn’t anything spectacular. We honestly just got it for the novelty.
Water in hand, we drove back to the hotel and hurriedly packed up all of our things. We were completely out of room by 11:45am, but we still had a little exploring to do, so we headed back to Hot Springs for our last look around Hot Springs.
We took the West Mountain Road, which we’d missed the day before, up another mountain to look at the city below. Mark got some pictures of a building he thought was cool, and we saw a few more trees that have started to change colors for fall. This view looked a little more over the town than the forests. We saw a few deer, as well, which I guess is why the gate leading up to the mountain said that it didn’t open until 8am. I imagine the roads are full of deer any earlier in the morning.
At the top, we parked the car and hopped out to take some majestic photos of Ripley. She is really quite photogenic. We were giggling and getting Ripley to jump on tall rocks and generally having a good time before we even realized we were interrupting the silence some poor fellow had driven to the top of the mountain to enjoy. He was sitting so quietly looking out across the field below that we didn’t even notice him until we were practically on top of him. He didn’t seem to mind us too much, and I hope that’s really the case. Since it was a Monday, no one else was really out and about and we were definitely the only people out there.
Mark and Ripley scaled a rocky cliff while we were taking pictures, and I stayed firmly on the ground with the camera. Ripley loves scrambling up the rocks, and Mark is much braver than I am when it comes to heights. He’s also much more confident in his footing. It takes me forever to climb anything that looks even remotely dangerous. I never put my weight on anything without being sure it will hold me and I’m not going to slide back down. I guess I’m a wuss, but Mark’s not the one that’s broken a couple of bones.
We drove back down the mountain and stopped at the chocolate place that we’d missed the day before. Since Ripley was with us, we had to take turns picking out our chocolate. The gentleman working at the store was happy to oblige us, though, and we came away with a little box of sweets for our drive home. We were tempted by the caramel apples and the fudge, but we ended up with little chocolates that we could eat easily. Anything else would’ve most likely melted before we could’ve eaten it all. I do kind of want caramel apples this fall, though. I don’t think I’ve had one since I was a kid.
Our drive home was pretty uneventful. We started a new book, Dance Hall of the Dead, which we got about halfway through. We stopped at a Chipotle in Texarkana for lunch. The weather was nice, and they had an outdoor seating area, so we took Ripley over to the tables there and ate outside in the shade. She was a very good girl and sat quietly while we ate. She can be quite the angel when she wants to be.
We ended up getting home around 7pm or so, and we ran right back out for dinner after we unpacked the car. All of the traveling around made for a long weekend, but we had a lot of fun. In fact, we are talking about taking the Monday of our next Fort Smith trip to visit the highest point in Arkansas. We haven’t decided yet, but we haven’t got long. It’s only two weeks away.
