If you haven't seen the previous post in this series, my sister and I try to take a vacation together at least once a year, and this year, we had originally planned to take the trip in June, but life intervened and we postponed it to September. I picked her up in Louisville and drove to Nashville, where we did a little sightseeing. From Nashville, we drove to Hot Springs, Arkansas, the main event of the vacation. At 97 degrees, Nashville had been hot, and we were looking forward to going somewhere milder. But when we arrived in Hot Springs, it was 98 degrees! And no relief in the immediate forecast.
The first day in a new place is always our orientation day. Where are the grocery stores, shopping centers, and gas stations? How do we get to the local places of interest? So Sunday we drove all over the place, reconnoitering.
We wound up walking around downtown Hot Springs and ended at the Arlington Hotel, a historic building and the largest hotel in town, with 500 rooms. The dining room was elegantly old-fashioned and the food was amazing! I ordered a lunch portion of meatloaf, but a dinner portion arrived at the table - three huge slabs - a mountain of meat!
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| Arlington Hotel |
The town was way different from our expectations. We thought there would be a row of bathhouses and not much else, plus the mountains on either side. But it's a real for-real town! The historic downtown sits on the opposite side of the street from the bathhouses, and the newer parts are south of the historic street. There's a casino and a horse track - the track has been there since 1905! Hot Springs is where spring training for baseball started. Babe Ruth and other famous old-time ballplayers were here - and gangsters, too. So much history! So much fun!
Our first day, partly because of the heat, we took a couple of tours at the National Park visitors center. One was a walking tour outside and focused on how the thermal springs work, and we walked to an open
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| Hot water cascade |
spring, plus up to the Grand Promenade to see a whole lot of springs that have numbered protective covers over them. All the water is piped to holding tanks and sent to thermal jug fountains, drinking fountains, and bathhouses - about 700,000 gallons A DAY. Unbelievable! There was also an unnumbered seep in a grassy area. When one of the people on the tour asked about it, the ranger said it's a new spring that showed up about five years ago! The hot water from that little spring flowed across the grass and the Promenade, and into the grass on the other side, then soaked into the ground. The water was hot enough that any grass it touched was brown.
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| Tufa Trail |
After that short presentation, we walked farther down the Grand Promenade to the Tufa Trail, which connects the Grand Promenade to the Arlington Hotel's historic grand lawn and a hot water cascade. Then back along the main street, Central Avenue, to the visitors center for a tour of the Fordyce bathhouse, which houses the visitors center. We saw the changing rooms, the bathing rooms, the shower rooms - everything! There were HUGE bathtubs, sitz baths, "needle" showers, cooling rooms, "vapor cabinets" that looked like something straight out of a 1930s Popeye cartoon, and the hydrotherapy room.
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| Fordyce Bathhouse "skylight" |
The men's changing room had a fancy fountain - an Indian maiden offering a duck to DeSoto. Seriously - a DUCK. The guys' side also had a beautiful stained glass ceiling/skylight that included naked ladies. Oh my!
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| DeSoto and Duck fountain |
Nothing like that on the gals' side! Upstairs were a gymnasium, gathering rooms, resting rooms. There was even a roof garden.
Then we walked down to the Superior bathhouse, where they've opened a microbrewery and cafe. They use the spring water to brew their beers, including ROOT BEER. We had fabulous portabello sandwiches, potato salad, and root beer floats. YUM!
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| Lamar Bathhouse |
After lunch, we walked to the Lamar bathhouse, where the National Parks has the gift shop. They sell glass jugs to fill with spring water if you didn't bring your own. There were always people filling jugs at the spring fountains, many with multiple gallon jugs. We had a good time looking at all the fun stuff, then walked back to the Fordyce where we looked at the exhibit rooms and watched a couple of videos - one told about Hot Springs history, and the other demonstrated the typical sequence of a bathhouse treatment.
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| Hot Springs Mountain Tower |
The next morning, I drove up to Hot Springs Mountain and North Mountain to look around and explore the loop road. There weren't many people up there, so it was quiet. On North Mountain, I saw a doe and a fawn at the side of the road. On Hot Springs Mountain, I checked out the tower and discovered that with a National Parks Passport you get a discount on the ride to the top. Then down to pick up my sister for lunch.
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| Tower view of North Mountain |
We ate The Purple Cow, a doo-wop style diner - great onion rings, lots of I Love Lucy memorabilia, oldies playing in the background, and PURPLE milkshakes! After lunch, we headed back to the mountains and up the tower. Expansive vistas of green hills and deep blue skies met us when we exited the elevator. We couldn't avoid the gift shop at the base of the tower, and we parted with some folding money there. Driving down from the mountains we saw another doe and two spotty fawns.
In the morning I drove up to the mountains again and hiked the two-mile trail that loops around the top of Hot Springs Mountain. I only encountered two people on the trail, hiking in the opposite direction from me. It was definitely warm, but shaded, and it wasn't miserable in the mid-morning. Later the heat was oppressive - again. That's the way it was every day of this trip - hot hot hot. Ugh.
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All these trips to the mountains sound time consuming, don't they? But the truth is the historic town of Hot Springs is situated in a narrow valley between Hot Springs Mountain and West Mountain. Hot Springs Mountain rises directly behind the bathhouses and the historic buildings across the street are backed right up against the face of West Mountain. When you drive up Hot Springs Mountain, you can look directly down at the roofs of the bathhouses. There are a couple of steep trails that start downtown and end at the Hot Springs Mountain Tower, and I saw crazy people climbing them in that terrific heat. Looked like unnecessary self-inflicted torture. Not me, thank you very much!
The following day, we "took the waters," but that's in Part 3, so you'll have to wait to hear about that!
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