Day 2: Hot Springs, Arkansas to Memphis, Tennessee

Let's see if I can string together a bit more of a coherent post than last night. Blogger stinks on a mobile device! Honestly, for the best scoop, you probably ought to go check out Mike's blog. He's so detail oriented, and his memory is so much better than mine. Anyway...

Hot Springs. Pretty cool little place. The area is fed by all of these lovely little thermal springs. The water bubbling up out of the earth is a toasty 143 degrees or so when it exits the earth. Thanks to the Junior Ranger program (more on that in a bit)... we learned that the springs are fed by rain water high in the mountains that follows all these lovely little cracks and crevices deep into the earth where it gets all nice and toasty warm, then it follows more cracks and crevices back to the surface. The water is not warmed by volcanic activity so it doesn't have sulfur in it which means no rotten egg smell. It tastes lovely, though hot. You can fill bottles from taps along bathhouse row.  The waters are known for their medicinal properties.

The 8 bathhouses that are left make up bath house row. These were all build in the late 1800's - early 1900s. Only one still operates as a barthhouse, which is basically a luxury spa. And no, we did not get a chance to take a spring fed bath. Maybe next time.  The other 7 are businesses of various sorts, a couple of them are National Park Service buildings. The Fordyce bathhouse serves as a museum and has been restored to it's glory days. It's quite interesting to go through, some of the luxury treatments offered seem a bit medieval - the electric bath in particular. The Superior Bathhouse has been turned into a little brewery restaurant touting themselves as the only place in the world that brews their own beer and root beer with the natural thermal hot spring waters. Both the beer and root beer were very good. The food was good too.

We also took a nice little hike up the mountain to the lookout tower. The view from the top of the tower was lovely. The Ouachita mountains were off in the distance, the town of Hot Springs down below us. The hike was a very steep 1/2 mile up. It was extremely humid and I was glad we chose to do the hike early in the day. We saw some deer, a chipmunk. I was reminded of how nice it is to hike outside of central Texas where the trees offer some shade and even in the extreme humidity it is quite tolerable and pleasant.

After Hot Springs we trekked on over to Little Rock. It's kind of a thing for me to go visit state capitols when the opportunities arise. The Little Rock building was very beautiful. Tons of marble, very big. There were large bronze doors at the main entrances. When we got there I noticed a man standing on a ladder doing something to one of the doors. It turns out that in order to maintain the luster intended by the original door sculptor, the doors are polished inside and out by hand every week. The doors are 10 feet tall. That's a lot of hand polishing.

We got our first taste of real rain in Little Rock. We cut the sight seeing short because of a torrential downpour. Enough rain that it warranted sitting in a parking lot for about 15-20 minutes to let the storm pass. It was the kind of rain that would have kept me off the road anywhere, not just because I was in unfamiliar territory.  In fact, all I really thought was "huh, we're getting a Texas sized storm in little Arkansas.".

Then it was on to Memphis. Just a taste of Memphis tonight. We found a nice little place for dinner - Automatic Slims, then walked over to Beale street. Beale street is somewhere between Austin's 6th street and New Orlean's Bourbon street. Just fun to say, yeah, I've been there. We've got a little history planned for tomorrow. Graceland may or may not be on our list of stops. I think we'd all like to check out the Mississippi River a bit. It's big :-)

That's day 2. Pictures will surface eventually. For now, enjoy the words.