TRAVELOGUE: HOT SPRINGS, ARKANSAS, PART ONE -- 5/29/23-5/30/23 (A STEAMY GOOD TIME)

Recently, my wife had the brilliant idea that she, my son, and I should take a vacation to Hot Springs, Arkansas. While it might make more joyless sense on paper to put away an extra few thousand dollars a year for retirement, it makes enjoyable sense in real life that the three of us make some memories together before my wife and I are old, wrinkly, and decrepit enough to actually retire, if either of us actually does make it to 157 years and 3.4 months old, the new recommended U.S. retirement age. As my wife had this good idea, I decided to have a terrible one, like eating an aging fruit salad before drinking an entire bottle of Early Times: the day before we left for the trip, I lost my wallet, and after a generic and fruitless search, my forgiving wife and I decided we'd have to get through the week on just her debit card, and get through we did. No, this travelogue is not one big advertisement for Apple Pay. I am over 40 years old, and I do not understand how to use that. We literally shared her debit card.
We set off early on Monday, May 29, with hope in our hearts and sleep on our brains, as pulling an all-nighter looking for your wallet isn't exactly physically, emotionally, and spiritually rejuvenating. However, the sky gently held a soft blue hue, and the rising sun mirrored our bright and shining excitement, and before we knew it, we had driven nearly four hours to Shreveport, Louisiana, our first major stopping point. Stomachs growling, we pulled off the interstate to Twisted Root, the best food option on my wife's brief Shreveport google search right before we drove into Shreveport. Twisted Root is essentially a fancy burger place, but it promised exotic meats, and I was as happy as a sabretooth tiger on a bison's back to see they were offering elk as a burger meat choice that day, as I'd yet to try it, and elk are smaller than bison and easier for sabretooth tigers to eat, so I guess that metaphor worked. The guy at the counter told me, "You should get buffalo, it's a lot milder. I don't like the elk, it's too gamey," to which I replied, "Oh, awesome, then I'll definitely take the elk burger on your most pungent sandwich," which turned out to be the Gosh Jam It, a burger featuring Texas herbed goat cheese, tomato-bacon-onion jam, and chipotle sauce. Thankfully, that delightfully smelly loaf was one of the best burgers I've ever eaten. The fries were just okay. As for beverages, I'll always go nuts for a rare soda, and the local Twisted Root chain seemed to be serving their own label, with a cola, root beer, cherry limeade, and cream soda among the choices. However, the drinks all had one downfall in common: they were brewed with Shreveport water, which I am assuming is milked from the local rock quarry, as it tastes a bit like dirt and limestone shavings. I could taste that the syrups were high quality, especially the cream soda, which featured a hint of butterscotch, but the bad local water let it down. Sorry, Shreveport, I guess it's all that Shreve in your water.


We got back on the highway, and I made a shocking discovery: I always thought that Shreveport was the Northwest border of our good state of Louisiana, and that's all there is, but there's actually miles upon miles of nearly abandoned Louisiana wilderness between Shreveport and the Arkansas border, either that or I'm in the Matrix and they won't let me drive ou Eventually the hills grew bigger and more hilly and treeier (sorry for all the scientific jargon) and before we knew it, well actually we'd been in the car for seven hours and we quite knew it, up rose the Ouachita Mountains, and we were driving into the bustling valley of Hot Springs, Arkansas. The downtown looked inviting, but my car was as full as a tick on Dracula's bowels, so we stopped off at our Air BnB, which turned out to be a gem, built in 1926, and recently renovated by a couple who...definitely understand how to renovate something better than I do. We drug our bags up the steep steps to our greenery-laden mountain cottage home for the week, then headed back to downtown.









For some reason, before we did anything else in Hot Springs, my wife was obsessed with taking a "Duck Tour," which doesn't involve stalking around town like the John Hinckley Jr. of water fowl, but does involve getting a tour of Hot Springs on an amphibious truck that takes you down the city's most prominent streets before diving into and ferrying you around Lake Hamilton. We did, and our driver, Nick (go figure), claimed the Duck Tours are his family business, and he told jokes for days, insufferably capping each one with a drawn out QUACK and my wife was absolutely loving it, but eventually the QUACK's went past the point of annoyance for me to where I admired Nick's tenacious QUACKing consistency, and after the nearly 90-minute tour, was not disappointed at the money we spent on the Duck Tour tickets. Nick did a great job hammering home the city's landmarks and layout, so that I never felt like I didn't know where I was going for the rest of the week. He also recommended what turned out to be our dinner stop for the night, Capo's Tacos.



At Capo's, we learned an important lesson involving flies, and also who the Lord of them is. The Lord of the Flies, no matter what William Golding says, is Hot Springs, Arkansas. Apparently, flies are attracted to hot springs, and Hot Springs has such famous hot springs within its borders, it is named after them. We tried to eat tacos in the beautiful sunset, and were quickly chased inside by a bombarding swarm. This bad start continued when we dug into our queso appetizer and found that, while it tasted fine, it barely had a thicker consistency than Dracula tick's lunch after a warfarin. However, when the actual tacos we ordered arrived, the experience suddenly shifted away from meh to QUACK! I ordered the pork belly, which featured, in Southern Louisiana parlance, cracklins (with pickled red onion and chipotle honey), and the Baja, which says it contains fried red snapper (along with Jicama slaw, habanero mayo, and mango chipotle crema), and even if the fish might have been just well-seasoned tilapia (or maybe it was red snapper), I don't care because it was delicious. We also ordered an Esquite, which is basically just a delicious bowl of cheese and corn. We devoured our fly-free food then realized that we had been up all day, travelled almost 700 miles, and just eaten our weight in tacos (okay, let's be honest, my wife and son ate moderately, and I ate ALL THREE of our combined weights in tacos) and that we needed to get back to the house. First though, my wife decided we needed ice for our water bottles throughout the week. There's a Sonic near Capo, so we grabbed a ten pound bag from there...and I smashed that bag into the pavement in front of the house every morning of the trip to break its contents into pieces small enough to fit into everyone's water bottles.



We settled into the AirBnb and I quickly grabbed the remote, found a channel, and threw the remote away so that my wife would not find it, as I would rather watch movies on a trip, and my wife prefers to watch the dumbest, trashiest reality shows possible, like Incest Moms or whatever is popular now. I am one of the three people in America who still have cable service, so a Roku TV always perplexes me, but I found that their "Live TV" option had a Lionsgate Movie channel, which essentially just plays movies from the stable of hundreds produced by the now 26-year-old production company, Lionsgate, with limited interruption. That night they were playing Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, which I had already seen in the theater with my family in 2019, but I really enjoyed the unique story and atmosphere in that film (its adaptations of the stories from its source material, not so much), so I watched it again, as everyone drifted to sleep.


The next morning, like the cat that eats the early bird, I got up far before everyone else, running through our hilly neighborhood to downtown Hot Springs, then to what just looked like a small park with a pavilion. I found stairs leading up, and an elevated brick pathway, where I had an extremely pleasant conversation with a military retiree about how to get to the "actual hot springs" in Hot Springs. Thankfully, the town resident didn't report me to the police, but explained that the hot springs were right over my head, just a few feet away, and that this was actually the entrance to Hot Springs National Park. Apparently, I was standing at the base of a mountain, and there was a giant tower on top that offered an incredible view of the area. I thanked him, then ran to the steamy springs, then ran about halfway up the tower trail to make sure I had my bearings, then ran back to the house, woke up my family, forced them into the car, and we parked downtown and walked a few hundred feet back to the park entrance. I then drill-sergeanted them up the mountain, scoffing at their requests for breaks until my wife reminded me that most people don't run 30 miles a week or are insane (I do or am at least one of those things), so I let them rest. Admittedly, the hot Arkansas sun didn't feel much milder than our South Louisiana sun, despite the greater proximity. Eventually, we reached a pretty cool overlook, featuring a pretty cool crow (the smartest creatures on Earth...way smarter than the disgustingly cute bunnies I also saw).





Finally, we reached the base of the tower. Like any good American attraction, you have to enter and exit through the gift shop, and we paid the entrance fee and rode the elevator way, way, way up, 216 feet to be exact, approximately 1,256 above sea level, or roughly 1,255 feet above where we left from the previous day. Actually, we first went to the museum right before the top, then climbed steps up to the open-air observatory. The museum in the tower taught me something I found to be a bit revelatory in a geography geek sort of way: the Ouachita Mountains are a completely different geologic entity than the Ozarks of Northern Arkansas, and actually have little to do with them. The Ouachitas were formed hundreds of millions of years ago, essentially when the landmass carrying Louisiana rammed into Arkansas, creating mountains that once rose 10,000 feet over the sea, but have now eroded to, at the highest point, 2,753 feet, which is still higher than the highest point of the Ozarks, suck it you lazy plateaus (seriously, the Ozarks are just ancient plateaus that rode the Ouachita collision and elevated a bit). The Ouachitas are also, according to what I was told, the only mountain range in the U.S. the runs East-West instead of North-South, due to the unique nature of their formation, and also, they're pronounced Wash-it-aw. Also, baseball teams used to train here for the supposed healing powers of the water and there is baseball memorabilia everywhere, even in the tower! TLDR: what a view! The open-air observatory is a Hot Springs tourist must visit.


We asked the gift store workers if there was a quicker path down the mountain than the vast series of switchbacks we came up on, found there was "but it's really steep," found the steep path, and essentially rode down the mountain on our keesters. Keysters? Keasters? BUTTS. On the way down, we got a great view of Hot Springs' most visually massive architectural marker, the old Army-Navy hospital, then rehabilitation center, then massive, haunted, derelict property, full of, ideally, ghosts, or less ideally, fenty zombies. The trail came out right in the middle of Hot Springs' famous "Bathhouse Row (more on that in the second entry)" and the three of us paid a quick visit to the Hot Springs National Park visitor center, located in the old Fordyce Bathhouse, now museum, which includes a self-guided tour. My wife and I found the sanitarium-like old bathhouse and its exhibits interesting, but my son was bored, creeped out, and hungry, as I guess 13-year-old boys don't find museums explaining how water permeates through layers of sediment over 4,000 years to be very exciting.







Once we reached Central Avenue (literally right in front of Fordyce Bathhouse), the literally titled street that runs through downtown Hot Springs, we went to Grateful Head Pizza, which is--literally--a hippy-dippy, tie-died pizza place inspired by the old psychedelic jam band, The Grateful Dead, but in 2023, sounds like a sexual act performed in thanksgiving; literally. There's nothing sexual about their pizza, though, or I guess there is for someone in 2023, as in this lurid hellscape there is surely someone who can only get a boner or wet lady parts by touching the scalding hot, melted cheese of this delicious dish of Italian origin. I ordered a "Cosmic Charlie," which according to Grateful Head's menu, includes, "In-house Wavy Gravy Ranch Base, Grilled Chicken, Baby Spinach, Red Onions, Fresh Minced Garlic & Mushrooms." The garlic might have been minced, but I won't mince words when I say this was the best thing I ate on this trip. Admittedly, Central Arkansas did not prove to feature the greatest cuisine this son of South Louisiana has experienced. However, at Cosmic Charlie's, as I wrapped my longing lips around the soft, buttery puffs of crust, delicately nibbling the perfectly layered toppings, tongue lapping the gentle, languid flow of savory sauce, their perfectly trimmed triangle hit the spot.



Either because of the previous paragraph, or because I hadn't had a chance to since the last morning, I let my wife and child wander downtown, while I went back to the house and took a shower, then took a minute to cool off. Feeling refreshed, I headed back to pick them up, and we ventured to a bunch of stores around town, including a couple of gnarly retro video game stores, and the Hot Springs shopping mall, which sent me into a quick depression spiral, as it looked like something left behind from the mid '00s, 3/4 of the stores shuttered, artificial light dim and haunting, stores like Bath and Body Works and American Eagle anchoring abandoned hallways populated by ghosts of the George W. Bush administration, Avril Lavigne defiantly echoing from unseen speakers, proud knight guarding the empty Corn Dog Castle. I begged my family to free me from the torment of feeling old--like the past is something that will die with me--and we exited through the well-stocked, little-shopped FYE.





I was originally going to have Part One of this two-part travelogue cover the next day in this trip. However, as I realized just how much we packed into this second day of the trip, I've decided to end it on this night, of May 30, 2023. We finished our shopping excursion, drove back to downtown, and at my wife's request, parked and walked to a food truck roundup to try out a hibachi one she heard was good. The hibachi place, and nearly all of the trucks were closed. A Thai-food truck was open, so we ordered from there, and in the second most annoying moment of the trip, waited a full hour for our food, as a massive plague of flies crashed and buzzed into us. We fled to a covered area, whose large fan at least kept the flies from our faces and our finally arriving food (our feet and legs were an all you can eat fly smorgasbord, and unlike us, they didn't have to wait for their food). I immediately regretted ordering the pineapple rice, as its flavors crashed into each other and burned my throat with conflicting, unpleasant taste. My wife and son said, over the deafening thrum of the swarm, that their beef and broccoli was fine, so good for them. We then walked downtown, and my wife and son suggested we visit the Rocket Fizz candy store they'd patronized when I was taking a shower earlier. We did, and I bought a make your own six-pack of sodas, many with incredible titles like this Patriotic "We got Bin Laden" Seal You Later, a classic cola containing delicate notes of cherry, vanilla, oak, and revenge. I turned Bin Laden's beard upside down and chugged the entire Seal You Later in the car because it was a looooong day. 

Having carpe diem'd our asses off, the three of us headed to our magnolia-haunted home and slept the sleep of the dead...

 
Will we arise?
STAY TUNED FOR PART TWO!!!