1/16/2022

Have you ever had a day that starts out great and holds a lot of promise, but then starts showing cracks as the day goes on and ends up…well, just not that great? Yup, that was my day today.

I woke up this morning still in Oklahoma City and had breakfast at the French cafe in my hotel before checking out. My waitress was wonderful and chatted with me throughout my meal…mostly about how much she hated the cold and couldn’t understand how I could live “up north” (it’s Nebraska, not Alaska…and it’s not like the temperature was all that different there in Oklahoma), but whatever. As an aside, everything was great at that hotel (I stayed at The Ambassador in Midtown), and in hindsight I wish I had stayed one more day (i.e. today) to get away from the Midtown neighborhood where I was staying and really explore the city on a day that wasn’t 8 degrees outside. But I didn’t, and as a result I fell victim to something that ironically I had tried my best to avoid on this trip, namely awkward pacing. See, last trip I went to too many destinations where I only blocked off 1-day’s worth of time for the stop even though I ended up feeling like it needed 2+ days to fully enjoy. So on this trip, I blocked off at least 2-days for each destination. Oklahoma City’s 2-days were up and it was time to head to the next stop on the schedule to ensure that I could spend 2-days there as well. The problem, for reasons explained below, is that the next stop, Hot Springs, Arkansas, has proven to be a 1-day town (at least in the winter) and I now have no idea what I am going to do with myself here tomorrow. But, I digress! For the purposes of right now in the story, it is still a lovely January morning in a French cafe with a kind waitress, cold air outside, and a day full of promise.

After breakfast, saying adieu, and checking out of the hotel, I defrosted my Jeep and checked the temperature outside. It wasn’t that bad. The wind had died down, it was partly cloudy, and the temperature was now in the 20’s. It was going to be a great day with fresh snow on the ground and clear skies following the storm. After a few hours’ drive I had crossed into Arkansas, and from Fort Smith to Hot Springs I was convinced that I had found my next big ‘treasured spot’ in the United States. Locations on the drive looked and felt so similar to so many locations, from Child’s Meadow to Sacred Heart Church in Red Bluff, that I was convinced I was back in the North State on a winter day. It really just needed a big Lassen-type peak to finish the scene. Excited, I snapped a bunch of pictures along the drive and called my dad, telling him to start looking into the cost of ranch land in northwest Arkansas.

So there you go, North Staters. If you want to find a place with the look-and-feel of the North State or the movie True Grit, where you can get out and ranch, but where gasoline is still under $3 a gallon (insane!), taxes and regulations are low, you can still buy a nice 3-4 bedroom home in town for around $200,000, and you don’t need to deal with the crazy politics of California, then here is your best bet! In fact, to sweeten the deal even further, I just saw in the news that some towns in this part of Arkansas are willing to pay you $10,000 just to move here!!!

But…you might want to keep reading before you pull the trigger on a move to Arkansas.

So at some point during the drive, I dropped down from the mountains and into the valley where the town of Hot Springs and Hot Springs National Park are located. Just like dropping down from Highway 36 into Red Bluff, the temperature quickly climbed from the low 20s to the low 50s. I passed by two boating lakes heading into town – Lake Ouachita and Lake Hamilton, which kind of reminded me of small versions of Lake Shasta, and the town of Hot Springs itself kind of reminded me of a small Redding. Many of the trees still had their leaves, and the homes and buildings were all Victorian-style…further nods to the fact that this is the North State’s sister region. And then I got to Hot Springs National Park!

Hot Springs National Park has some really colorful history, which I will do my best to summarize here. As the name suggests, the area is inundated with hot springs, which flow out of the ground, just about everywhere, at an average temperature of 143 degrees F. It is rumored that the French and Spanish knew of the hot springs going all the way back to 1541, and that Thomas Jefferson ordered a full report on them shortly after becoming President given rumors that he had heard of the waters’ ‘healing powers.’

In 1832, President Andrew Jackson designated the spot a ‘Federal Reservation,’ essentially turning Hot Springs into the nation’s first national park, predating Yellowstone by more than 40 years. Unfortunately, the federal government had to fight land title issues in the US Supreme Court up to the early 1870s. When title finally cleared and was recognized as being vested in the federal government, the spot became a highly popular pilgrimage for Civil War veterans looking to heal their wounds and spirits. Elegant spas, hotels, and Victorian-style bathhouses began to spring up (pun intended…) about the springs, with their style and architecture attempting to invoke the look and feel of Rome, Spain, and the Mediterranean. Most of the National Park is just a preservation of the town and its bathhouses in their prime. It’s…really a breathtaking place to be honest, like something out of a movie, and it reminds you that America used to have such great architecture (you just don’t see things like this in modern cities and modern design…the art and balance and sense of purpose to the buildings is really cool):

As Hot Springs grew in popularity, so did its hotels, brothels, and gambling halls. By the early 1900s the mafia had discovered it and transformed it into its hideout-of-choice, becoming a popular retreat for Al Capone, Frank Costello, Bugs Moran, Lucky Luciano, and others. Another American institution had also discovered the site: Major League Baseball. From 1920s-1950s era, teams would come out here and make this their spring training home – playing ball and soaking in the bathhouses during the day, and gambling and having fun at night. With all the energy in the area, Hot Springs was seeing as many as 1,000,000 visitors a year during this time.

Then…the world changed. The old mafia was whacked, imprisoned, and otherwise broken up; professional baseball teams became less collegial, more competitive, and found their own spots for spring training; and bathhouses fell out of fashion. The bathhouses and the town of Hot Springs crashed and fell into disrepair, and it wasn’t until the 1980s that the government started putting money into it to try to restore the place to its former luster as a historical spot. The revitalization efforts continue to this day, with goals to reopen the bathhouses and make the place seem a bit more like its old self again at some point over the coming decade.

Okay…all of the above makes it seem like I had way too much fun today as a history buff (and maybe I did), but then stuff just started kind of stalling and going downhill for the rest of the day. As fascinating as the above walk-through-history was, it really only took a couple hours to experience and isn’t something that really needs to be relived again tomorrow (although maybe I will find something new there to explore). Also, the trails that I was hoping to hike in the area aren’t nearly as expansive as maps online made them seem, and they lead to some pretty short, boring jaunts to underwhelming vistas of the underlying valley that fail to capture the mountains I was seeing that morning to the west (the views instead are to the south). Those trails too only took me about an hour or so to tackle (during which time I chowed down on some delicious bison jerky that my dad got as a Christmas gift for some reason and that I stole from my parents’ pantry before leaving town…thanks mom and dad!).

Finally, the place is shockingly crowded with tourists and a fair number of homeless, and (so far at least) I have yet to find a decent place to eat. My dinner was especially bad at a Mexican restaurant here in town. I ordered a margarita, which tasted like it was watered down with soda water, and fajitas which…for some reason tasted like they were marinated in curry sauce? It didn’t even feel like I was eating Mexican food. Oh, and the people sitting a few tables away from me were insanely inappropriate and belligerent to the point where they practically cleared out the restaurant and then got themselves kicked out too. Literally one of the top three most offensive and frightening things I have witnessed in a public space, and a reminder that I am no longer in a Union State. In fact, I just started typing out their behavior and what they did and decided, you know what, I think I’ll keep it to myself and just say a prayer for them. But it was the sort of experience that ruins an otherwise good day, and it felt like a 180-degree turn from my lovely morning in that quaint French cafe in Oklahoma City. Now I’m back in my hotel room, watching what appears to be a fly buzzing around the room. I’ll have to try to catch it before I go to bed. Needless to say, I am ready to hit the road now and get on to Tennessee, but alas. I am in Arkansas for one more day. Until next time.

Cheers,

-Rob