Checking Back IN/On the Road Again With My Sister! - Part 2

I'm BACK.  Again.  I see that my last post was in MAY - nearly 6 months ago.  (I thought it had been longer, but hey...)  I guess I kinda sorta checked out.  I didn't mean to, but, well, life.  And not bad things, either.  Maybe too many good things.  But I always return to writing, and so here I am.  Sorry it took so long.

The previous post about our Sisters Trip to the Smokies highlighted the wildflowers we saw, the Roots and Rocks we clambered over, and other sights along the Roaring Fork Motor Trail.  There were plenty of other things we did inside the park!

One of the first things we did inside the park was head for the Sugarlands Visitor Center, on the Gatlinburg, Tennessee, side of the park, to get our passports stamped!  Yes, we are Those People With Passports.  But it was jammed with people so we returned a couple of days later SPECIFICALLY to get our Passports stamped.  It's an obsession!

The stamps are rubber stamps and they look a lot like round postage cancellation stamps.  There was one for the Sugarlands Visitor Center, and another for the Appalachian Trail, which passes through the park end to end for 71 miles, from Fontana Dam to Davenport Gap.  I despair of ever getting ALL the stamps because there are national parks outside the contiguous United States in Alaska, Hawaii, American Samoa, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, with more parks being designated all the time.  But it's fun to TRY!  

After the ordeal of the so-called "easy" trail at the Bud Ogle cabin off the Roaring Fork Motor Trail, we opted for an "accessible" paved trail close to the Sugarlands Visitor Center.  We skipped the one AT the visitor center, but drove a little way into the park to the Sugarlands Valley Nature Trail, which was paved and flat - a nice change from the Bud Ogle trail!  The trail is designed to be totally accessible - no rocks or roots or rocky stream crossings or steps up or down.  It must be the flattest trail in the entire park!  At only a half mile, it was short and fast, but we lingered.  Being close to the main road to Newfound Gap, we expected to hear a lot of road noise, but once we got away from the parking area, the quiet descended.  With only a couple of others on the trail, we felt far from civilization, but of course, we were NOT.  The trail is a loop.  We started on the section closest to the road, saving the riverside half for last.  There were chimneys remaining from a settlement that used to be in this location and we wondered what it was like to have lived there at the time.

We visited Newfound Gap, but skipped Clingman's Dome.  The Gap was busy, but the road to Clingman's Dome was so backed up, we decided to forego the dubious pleasures of an overcrowded park attraction.

On the North Carolina side of the park is the Oconaluftee Visitor Center (more Passport stamps!), and the Mingus Mill, an impressive historic grist mill just a short walk from its own parking area.  I have a fascination for water-powered mills, and I was not disappointed, except that it was not milling when we were there.  Something wasn't working correctly and they were waiting for The Man to come and fix it.  I walked upstream (and uphill!) to where the water to turn the mill wheel is shunted from the river - a nice little hike - again, beside the water and quiet.  These mills were engineering marvels!

My June Vacation in September (Part 2) - Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas

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!

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

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!

My June Vacation in September (Part 1) - Nashville, Tennessee

So I'm back from my June vacation with my sister.  No, we weren't vacationing for three months.  We had planned the trip for June, but because of my caregiving for That Knee, we rescheduled for September, and this time, we made it!

We met in Louisville and drove to Nashville.  We went to the Parthenon!

Yes, there's a Parthenon in Tennessee, a full-size replica of the one in Athens, featured in The Lightning Thief - the book, the movie, and now, the musical.  It was HUGE but didn't look it until we were right up next to it.  I read somewhere that the building's proportions are so perfect that it doesn't look as massive as it is.

The original Parthenon was built in the fifth century B.C.E. to house a forty-two-foot tall statue of Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom.  The Nashville Parthenon was built in 1897 without the statue for Tennessee's Centennial Exposition.  In 1990 a gilded replica of the Athena statue inspired by nineteenth-century drawings and older descriptions was unveiled.

The figure standing in Athena's right hand is Nike, goddess of victory.  Just to give you an idea of the scale, this Nike is six feet tall!

In the end galleries are smaller-scale replicas of the east and west pediments, and plaster casts of some of the figures from the Elgin marbles which were removed from the pediments and are now housed in the British Museum in London.

The Parthenon is the centerpiece of Nashville's beautiful Centennial Park, the grounds of the 1897 Tennessee Centennial Exposition.  There is a man-made lake from the Exposition with a one-mile paved path that follows the lake's border and showcases some of the park's gardens and a brand-new tribute to the women's suffrage movement.

Even though it was hot hot hot (97 degrees!), there were plenty of people in the park running, feeding the ducks, and strolling around the lake.  There was also a quinceanera celebration, with the girls dressed in a rainbow of extravagant tulle and organza gowns.  The dresses were reminiscent of Civil War-era hoop skirts.  No wonder the party was outdoors - I doubt those dresses could have fit through most doorways, but the girls were beautiful!

This stop was just the prelude to our planned week at Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas.

Stay tuned for Part 2!