Arkansas – Fifty State Family

Hot Springs, Arkansas

An hour away from Little Rock is Hot Springs, Arkansas. They have hot springs and also, it’s in Arkansas, so, fittingly named. And cool. It is also historically significant, and charming and lovely.

One of the oldest parks in the National Park system, Hot Springs is named for the over 40 springs that flow through the area carrying mineral rich, 143 degree, 4000 year old water right through the town. It is cooled down enough to drink (but still hot) at public drinking fountains or, as we saw from tourists and locals alike, be carried off in jugs and glass bottles. Because the hot springs are so rich in minerals, the water was believed to be healing, and bath houses were built a century ago to pamper and treat the wealthy yet malaised. Many of these bathhouses still stand, and one, the Buckstaff Bath House, still offers treatments today.

While we did not partake of a bath, we did tour the Fordyce Bathhouse, which used to be operational, but now doubles as a museum and as the Hot Springs National Park Visitor Center. It’s a beautiful building with elaborate marble work and stained glass– everywhere, it seems, except in the women’s baths (rather telling for the times) where the free tour starts. The tour walked us through the elaborate multi-station bathing procedure and took us bottom to top through the bathhouse, including stops at the elegantly beautiful third floor parlor, and wood-paneled gym – left for exhibition the way it was used in the heyday of the Fordyce; throwing sticks and wooden weights and gymnastics equipment. The tour was a very interesting glimpse into the scientific and medical thought of the time, as well as a visible model of the inequality between men and women.

Part of the men’s bath, complete with stained glass, marble, and statuary. The gym from the time period. Part of the women’s bath, complete with plain white tables.

After our tour, we wandered around the main street of the town, Central Avenue, going in and out of various unique shops, buying some mediocre fudge, and stopping for our packed lunch by a fountain. The town was delightfully picturesque, with shops and cafes set right up against the Ouachita Mountains, and it had many fountains that we would drink from and be amazed at the hot spring water each time. Each. Time. We are easily amazed. Actually, it was just me that was still amazed. The thrill was over for the rest of the family by the third fountain.

One of the first few times at a fountain. I can tell because there is still a smile.

After a couple hours in the town of Hot Springs, we drove up the switchbacks to the nearby Hot Springs Mountain to see the view from the observatory and to do a little hiking. The view was great – trees and gently folded mountains as far as the eye could see for 360 degrees. The hike was dull – and we aborted after 20 minutes or so on the trail that didn’t afford any views and was only marginally pretty in comparison to our hike the day before at Petite Jean State Park. While we are easily amazed, we are also careful in our consideration of the pay-off to effort ratio.

View from the observatory on Hot Springs Mountain.

The travel time from our hotel in Conway, Arkansas to Hot Springs was 3 hours round trip, but it was a day well spent. A little history, a little nature, and a Dasani bottle full of really hot spring water – that may or may not have halted the cold I felt coming on, just saying…

Bill Clinton’s Arkansas

So, in planning our trip into Arkansas, I was really expecting not to like it. After all, it’s Arkansas. But upon arriving, I found it to be Arkansas! It was one really pretty state. Our first stop was, of course a rest stop. Graffiti covered and complete with bars on the vending machines, it was a no frills, we-have-a-crime-issue, move-along, type of rest stop (hey Arkansans, not the best intro to your state). But our second stop was the Clinton Presidential Library. I have no particular desire to ever visit a presidential library, but on this trip each person got to pick a site to visit, and this is what my husband chose. If you knew my husband, you would know this is confusing. You might have read in the another Arkansas post that my husband thought the Little Rock Nine was legit a baseball team…

Nonetheless, we arrived in the lobby of the William J Clinton Presidential Library and Museum, a sleek and modern mix of metal and marble, which helped to echo the loud thwack and subsequent traumatic crying behind me. I knew that it could only be my kids because Everyone Else’s Kids were all standing about introspectively considering the Clinton Presidency. One of mine, however, managed to trip over her sister’s foot and land on her thigh. How is it even possible to land on one’s thigh?

It was this fall that dictated the rest of our exploration through the museum. The audible gasp that carried through the atrium from the second floor as my daughter fell belonged to an exhibit guide that rushed down to examine Charlotte’s leg. He felt it gravely necessary that we ice down her thigh and escorted us to the lower level of the building to sit outside Café 42 (clever) where we waited for the ice delivery. Possibly from the actual Arctic. It took a long time.

By the time we got back to the main level, the tour had already moved 20 minutes ahead of us, so we took two uninterested children through a series of displays of the events of a presidency they could not relate to, which made it all the more difficult for us adults to linger over the displays. We eventually passed the tour group and discovered that the guide was fairly dry, so we were just as well off going at our own, slightly quicker pace. On the upper level – and the kids were so very excited that there was an upper level – there was a large display of White House china, and gifts that have been given to the US by visiting dignitaries over the years. But the best thing, in my opinion, was the recreation of the Oval Office as it was during Bill Clinton’s time. The room was roped off, but we were able to stand in the doorway and the guide posted there gave us information on various artifacts in the room. The guide happened to be the very man that came rushing down to our aid after The Fall Heard ‘Round the Atrium, and he took some time to discuss the fact that it was during Clinton’s term that it became common for government officials to carry coins or tokens specific to their position. This was common in the military before this time, but during the Clinton era, other government groups received tokens that were used, in part, to identify themselves as belonging to certain groups. Our guide held out a token from his pocket and instructed us not to touch, but we followed his purposeful point to read, “secret service”. He smiled at us then, and it was sweet to think of this man as perhaps a former secret service agent, now being working in the Clinton Library in his older years.

We left, then, and this is where those of you who bribe your children for good behavior have some leverage. The gift shop is not in the Library proper, but about a half mile away via golf cart-like shuttle. The gift shop is in a cute little revitalized area of Little Rock that borders the Arkansas River, and that area includes many little shops and restaurants – and a park. A cool park where kids can climb down into what looks like sewer pipes and pop up in another part of the park to climb a rope jungle gym or play in a splash fountain or climb a rock wall. It looked so much like sewer grates in fact, that my husband yelled at the kids for going down them. It looks so much like sewer piping and is so hard to keep track of your children, that kids will love it. Perhaps even enough to hang in there during your tour of the William J Clinton Presidential Library and Museum.

Central High School – do we HAVE to go?

Yes, family. It’s historically significant, we will not likely be in Little Rock again, and that’s that. Plus, I’m driving.

And, since my husband literally thought that the Little Rock Nine was a minor league baseball team, I felt that this was a must-do.

The Little Rock Nine were not a baseball team, but in fact a brave group of black boys and girls that were the first to integrate Central High School in 1957. This was met with such vehement opposition that the 101^st Airborne had to be called out to escort these children to school. White parents would spit at these nine young kids and call them names and threaten and harass them, yet this small band of students stood up to all that hate and kept going to school, fighting for an equal education. I felt that this was an important part of US history for my family to know on a more personal level.

The National Park Service runs the Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site, and Central High School is a working high school still today. The visitor center is across the street and catty-corner from the high school, and for us, was about a 30-minute experience. Banks of TV screens showed various bits of footage and newsreels from the time of the conflict and there were also smaller, more personal listening stations as well. There were plenty of photographs and paper artifacts that visitors could look at to get still more perspective. Some of the audio was from interviews with members of the Nine, both from 1957 and more recently.

For families planning a visit, The Visitor Center’s exhibits held the attention of my 12 year-old for about 15 minutes, judging by the amount of time that passed before she began asking me if we could leave yet. It actually held the attention of my 6 year-old a little longer – mostly because there were screens with buttons to push and phones that you could lift off receivers.

After about a half-hour, we left the Visitor Center and walked over to the high school itself. I just felt it necessary to give my girls a sense of the place. They did not want to, there were certainly more fun things to in their mind – namely, a hotel pool, but I really wanted them to absorb just a little bit from actually being there. When they learn about the Little Rock Nine in school, I am hoping that they have a little more gravitas from having been to the actual site.