TRAVELOGUE: HOT SPRINGS, ARKANSAS, PART TWO -- 5/31/23-6/2/23 (AN EVEN STEAMIER GOOD TIME)

Last time on the Nicsperiment: As a good husband and father, I took my family on a vacation to Hot Springs, Arkansas. As a bad husband and parent, I lost my wallet the day before the trip. Therefore, my wife, having the superheroic ability to not lose her wallet the day before a trip, transformed into her alter-ego, Sugar Momma, and held our only method of payment in her wallet. With these powers at our disposal, we packed an entire trip's worth of activities into the first two days of our trip, recounted in grotesque and disgusting detail in Part One of this travelogue. The below is the second and final part of the travelogue, and covers the last three days of the trip. May God have mercy on your soul.

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As Hot Springs, Arkansas is in proximity to one of the most prominent quartz crystal mines in the world, and my wife is named after one of those words, though it would be cool if she was named after both, we decided to go to the Ron Coleman Crystal Mine to try to dig some. This is wiser than visiting a mine named after me, as Nicsperiment is more rare, but worth a lot less. We drove through the mountainous countryside north of Hot Springs until we reached what looked like the set from an Indiana Jones film. Near an enormous pit in the red rock and earth lied piles and piles of dirt, and dozens of people digging through it and wheelbarrowing stuff away, almost like we were in San Francisco. We registered at the visitor's center, then took a tour of the mine, which included not only a trip on an old army truck down to the very bottom, but some great digging tips from our astute guide whose name I can't remember, just like I still can't remember where I put my wallet. A dump truck consistently brings fresh earth from the mine up to visiting diggers, and for $25 you can dig all day, but in the noon heat of a brutal start to the summer, I figured the most I could get out of my wife and son was 90 minutes, and I was right. Like a San Franciscan fenty zombie, they had to drag me off the pile, as I just kept finding stuff, and the clearest piece is shown in my hand below, along with some big, beautiful chunks I put in our landscaping. In shocking news, several days later, I lost that little clear one. I used to just misplace things, but now they're not turning back up, which frankly feels a bit ominous. 










We drove back into Hot Springs hungrier than a Gen-Z during a Flaming Hot Cheeto famine, and my wife picked the Hungry Greek as our dining destination. It was pretty good, but for what is technically a chain, we paid the highest bill on the trip for a few plates of meat and rice (and fries, as one eats in Greece). They did, like most Hot Springs restaurants, sell Pepsi products, so I made up for the high cost of the food by drinking 14 Mountain Dew Iced Teas. I was also drinking so much yellow gold...wait, gold is yellow, that doesn't work...uh...caffeine-infused high-fructose corn syrup gold because I was nervous about our next destination, the Quapaw Baths, a public bathhouse. My wife brought up the idea of us going to one of these a few months ago, and showed me the Quapaw website to assure me it wasn't weird, but seeing phrases like "private rooms for couples" worried me that the "flip-flops must be worn when out of the water" demand was only being made to protect visitors' feet from all the jizz on the floor. Thankfully, the Quapaw Baths weren't that weird at all. We paid to visit the main pool area, full of Hot Springs water just like the good old Hot Springs days of yore, when people came from all over the world to bath in its waters. The pool is broken up into several segments, with the central portion featuring 104 degree farenheit(the superior method of measuring temperature) water, while the surrounding pools feature water that's just a few degrees cooler. Everyone is required to shower off in the changing room first, which I found to be clean, safe, and private, and after my son and I split up with my wife to go to the separate male and female changing rooms, we reunited, got in the water, and sweat a lot. It was kind of weird basically sitting in the boiling juices of a bunch of other people, but the facility felt like it was as clean as it could be, and while it wasn't this germophobic introvert's favorite experience, I didn't hate it, either, and at least found the floor to be mostly jizz-free.




After all that sweating, or maybe just because I primed myself with all that Mountain Dew, I had a sweet tooth. I left my family out in front of Quapaw, and ran down Central Avenue to Kringles and Kones to try to order a kringle, getting there at 4:53 p.m. when they were supposed to close at 5 p.m. However, it was at this moment I learned a most disappointing fact: many Hot Springs businesses are closed on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday--I guess because there are less tourists those days...or is that a thing everywhere? Sunday and Monday are the days in Baton Rouge places are closed, as we are...not quite the tourist magnet Hot Springs is, outside of a few Saturdays in the fall. Whatever, who cares, I needed sugar! My determination to eat something sweet was stronger than any business wanting to get the hell out of San Francisco. My wife had been urging that we visit Central Avenue's Cupcake Wars-featured Fat Bottomed Girls Cupcakes, even though neither she nor my son eat cupcakes. Maybe cupcakes would satisfy my wicked teeth? Thus, I became the family guinea pig, soon discovering that Cupcake Wars isn't a barometer for quality, as my red velvet churro and strawberry cheesecake cupcakes were dry, and outside of an overwhelming sweetness, flavorless. Back during the Cupcake War-spawning cupcake fad of the late '00s and early '10s, Baton Rouge gave birth to an establishment called Sweet Wishes. Sweet Wishes cupcakes were moist, dense, and full of delicious, complex flavor, and in the near decade since they've closed, I've continuously discovered that even a food as twee as a cupcake is done miles better in South Louisiana. I ended up eating half of each Fat Bottomed cupcake, feeling sick, chugging my chocolate milk, and throwing the rest in the trash. At that point, the only cure for what ailed me was minigolf.





Pirate's Cove Adventure Golf in Hot Springs, Arkansas is one of the nicest, cleanest, shadiest (as in there's a lot of overhead shade, not that it's unscrupulous), most playable minigolf establishments at which I've played. Much like life, you can opt between two courses: one that goes over a pirate ship, or one that goes over a waterfall. We picked the waterfall course, and as usual, I won bigly, but we all had fun, as seemingly did the rest of the nice-sized crowd of very kind and sociable folks also playing the courses, including the North Louisiana family directly behind us, whose six-year old son continuously gave us playing tips and cheered us on. Once we finished the 18-hole course in the beautiful late-day Hot Springs light, we decided we were tired of Hot Springs restaurants and went on a little Kroger trip to get some bread, peanut butter, and jelly. We don't have a Kroger in Baton Rouge, but I liked the store, which I can favorably compare to the minigolf place, in that it is nice, clean, shady, and very playable. I got some blackberry preserves as my peanut butter sandwich sweet spread, we headed back to the house, and following the "we are watching movies on the Roku Lionsgate channel every night" thread of Travelogue Part One, watched 1999's DEFINITELY NOT NEARLY AS GOOD AS THE SIXTH SENSE, A SIMILAR GHOST FILM RELEASED THE MONTH BEFORE IT Stir of Echoes, which was clunky and goofy and dumb, but still atmospheric and kind of fun, especially as a night time vacation watch when you're in a century old house on a haunted mountainside. It paired well with a butterscotch soda I bought the night before. Then it was bedtime.














We woke up the next day, our final full day of the trip, with the desire for more hiking, with the caveat that said hiking must include at least one impressive waterfall. We decided on Lake Catherine State Park, and I'm not sure who Catherine is, but her lake and the surrounding territories are lovely. We enjoyed Catherine's rolling hills and shade, her rocky outcrops and overlooks. In one stream running through the park, I found to my joy that Catherine contains crustaceans. Crawfish are literally the family business, and as they've helped my parents put food on the table for decades, I have a special affection for them, so I was overjoyed to see one peering up at me from a stony stretch of creek-bottom. Also, they're cool! Many watersheds, even very small ones in Arkansas and especially Louisiana have their own--usually very rare--crawfish species, and from this great guide I found, I think this one was a Redspotted Stream Crayfish. Hey if not, and you think you know what species it was, leave a comment. Whatever the case, the little guy was just chilling, waiting for a snack to float by in the current, but good thing he was a few hundred yards upstream, safe from where the creek eventually pours ten feet down a glorious waterfall. After climbing around the top of the waterfall, we made our way down, but right as I was about to start taking pictures of it, one of the six or so people hanging out at the bottom stripped down to her underwear, grabbed her baby, and waded right into the middle of the pouring water, while her overprotective boyfriend/husband/presumably baby daddy kept insecurely looking over at me every time I tried to get a picture of the left side of the waterfall, which did not contain his nearly nude lady and crying "please get me away from this waterfall" baby. Finally they left, and I was able to snap some decent shots that at least had my lovely wife in them instead of that other chick. Also, someone was painting the waterfall, and hats off to them if I had been wearing a hat.











After our miles of mountain hiking, we were starving, and somehow ended up at a place called Red Oak Fillin' Station, which sounds like a redneck gas station, but is actually a barbeque place in the mountainous countryside. My wife ordered a steak, I ordered a barbecue sampler platter, and my son, before I could stop him, ordered crawfish étouffée. I shouldn't have stopped him because I love crawfish, as my family's work has resulted in the deaths of millions of crawfish, but because people north of Alexandria, Louisiana don't know how to make South Louisiana food. Indeed, instead of a thick, roux-based consistency, the étouffée (You want me to correct the word to toffee, spellcheck? GET BENT!) was essentially crawfish and some rice in tomato sauce. My son grimaced at his first bite, and I ended up having to give him most of my brisket, which was pretty good, so that he would have something palatable to eat. Indeed, all the barbecue, which I am confident Arkansas can make well, was just fine, but please, I beg you Red Oak Fillin Station, please change the name of your "étouffée" dish to Crawfish and Spaghetti Rice or something. Ugh. Still, the overall experience was positive, and we got back out to the KIA full and ready for more hiking.

In what eventually led to the most annoying moment of the trip, I quickly went from empathizing with my son, to wanting to throw him out the car window, as he announced that he didn't charge his phone the night before, his phone was dying, and that his phone being charged was more important than my phone being plugged into the car center console so that we could navigate around these unfamiliar mountain roads. This is why 13-year-old boys are not allowed to vote. We then took a short drive to Garvan Woodland Gardens on Lake Catherine's neighbor lake, Lake Hamilton (I've heard they hook up sometimes, but it's nothing serious). Garvan Woodland Gardens is a magical wonderland, both a botanical and woodland garden, containing a section called Garden of the Pine Wind Japanese Garden, a southern wildflower area, peacocks, an area showcasing local flora, any kind of area you could possibly imagine that can exist in the Ouachita Mountains in west-central Arkansas, zenned out, full of waterfall after waterfall, flower after beautiful flower, vista after beautiful vista, just an absolutely gorgeous place, go there.














At this point, we had walked many miles through the Louisiana-like heat, and everyone was tired, but I really, really wanted to see Anthony Chapel, a 60-foot-tall, mostly glass cathedral, just off the entrance to the gardens (and covered in the garden admission). It's a beautiful architectural structure from the outside, angular wooden from and beautiful transparent glass at the end of a beautiful stone path. The chapel is even nicer on the inside, especially on a hot day, as it's a cool and airy, ethereal and otherworldly room that I didn't want to leave, though I had to because there's a wedding there like every 15 minutes. There's also a carillon on the path, which is quite beautiful. A carillon, if you don't know, is a tower with many tuned bells on top, which are struck melodically through a piano-like keyboard. We actually have our own carillon in South Louisiana, and while the one next to Anthony Chapel is cool, the surreal factor of a giant tower with playable bells rising right up out of the Louisiana swamp can't be beaten...plus ours is twice as tall. Here's a bunch of pictures of theirs, though, along with Anthony Chapel, plus a really scary folk art piece inexplicably tucked away in a corner of the chapel, featuring dozens of human teeth. It's cute, I guess, if you're an Ed Gein fan, or Ed Gein.








We then drug our sweaty bodies to the car and headed back to Hot Springs. And that's when the most annoying moment happened. My son announced that his phone was now at 1% and that if it died, he would die along with it. I told him to let me get back to the main highway, back to where I'd memorized the route, and then he could have the charger port. Once I had two turns left to make, he asked how much longer, and I said to wait a minute. 20 seconds later, he flipped out that it had been a minute, and then GOD BLESS ALL PARENTS OF TEENAGERS, my wife and I had a knockdown, dragout argument with him that led to the phone dying in my wife's purse after it was taken away for the day, and then the three of us sitting in awkward silence in a GameStop parking lot. Thankfully, the cure for most things is ice cream, and we just so happened to be parked next to Scoops, a local joint featuring not only the best ice cream in Hot Springs, but some of the best I've had, period (to avoid confusion, I'll put an actual period after this parenthetical). My wife and I both got Scoops' Animal Cracker flavor and I think I also got Cookies and Cream maybe, but I don't know because I didn't take any pictures as I completely disassociated while inhaling my delicious dairy goodness. We then, at my request, visited Furniture Flea Market because it included a record store, Random Records, in its back corner. While I, due to my wildly specific tastes, did not obtain any hidden gems at Random, I did find a diamond in the rough in the older woman running the store, who was full of quips, and deadpanned to my wife, who essentially came later to pick me up, that I was "quick," while smirking suggestively. The flea market was an awesome collection of ephemera, including a bunch of awesome '90s stuff I would have bought if I had a second house just for crap.






NOTE: Damn, I'm just noticing the Jimmy Stewart autographed photo in the penultimate pic. I wish I had noticed it then! What a find!

We then went home and ate peanut butter sandwiches again, and the movie on the Lionsgate channel was Red 2, and I haven't even seen Red 1, but I had to follow my own rules, so to much confusion, my son and I watched the second of the Reds. Also, my son must have done something to impress my wife, because she gave him his phone back and he begged me to walk with him to a community garden a block away to catch a Pokémon or something, so we ended up having a great, breezy dusk walk, in the strange and unique block around our Dell Street house, where most off the homes are apparently a century old. We caught the Pokémon and then we walked back to finish the goofy Red 2, and I drank a King Kong Cola and then packed a little bit of our stuff and went to bed.







We woke up at a reasonable time, packed our stuff, and left with much sadness, though we had decided to make one last trip to downtown Hot Springs, so that I could finally get a Kringle, and to finally visit the historical headquarters of the Mountain Valley Spring Water Company. We greatly enjoyed (and parked next to) the beautiful Mountain Valley headquarters, bought a bunch of water, and currently might be addicted to its smooth, mineral-rich taste. We then split up and I bought three kringles (cherry, pecan, and apple cinnamon) and ate all of them in the car, and like most food in Hot Springs, they were fine, but not mind-blowing. Honestly, the best thing we ate in Arkansas was Scoops' ice cream and Grateful Head's pizza, though Capo Tacos tacos were also good. However, you can't buy food or anything else without money, unless you live in San Francisco, and the pre-ordained disaster prophesied on the day before our trip finally happened: losing my wallet the day before the trip finally came back to bite me on the ass. My wife had gone into a dress store, while my son and I bought the kringles and went for a short walk. I still had her wallet from buying kringles, and my son and I went back to the dress store to give it back to her. We didn't see her there, and went back to the car (where I ate all the kringles)...BUT SHE WAS THERE! in the dress store and we just didn't see her. We then waited in the car for quite a while, becoming extremely invested in the life of a wandering feral cat, but then suddenly my wife came out of nowhere, angrily marching toward the car and asking why we didn't come back to the store to bring her the wallet. I legitimately think she was hiding under a dress rack so we didn't see her and the entire thing was a giant prank, but whatever the case, she went back to the store with the wallet to get her dresses, came back, and we hit the highway back to South Louisiana.





I decided we'd go home a different route than we came, taking a beautiful highway through the Ouachitas to Little Rock, then turning South through Pine Bluff, and then Eastern Louisiana, cutting through Mississippi at Natchez, then back down to Louisiana and Baton Rouge. As we reached Pine Bluff, Arkansas, a city none of us had ever visited, my wife asked if we could get Chik-fil-A for lunch because there was one off the upcoming exit. As soon as we turned off the interstate, though, something felt wrong.

"I don't think there's a Chik-fil-A," I said. "I don't think there are any legal operating businesses here."
"It doesn't look that bad," she said, as we hit a ten-foot pothole and several zombie-like citizens looked up at us from the curb in confusion.
"No, babe. It does look bad. Like get murdered, bad. Like San Francisco bad."
"We live in Baton Rouge. How bad could it be?"
After driving very cautiously through blighted street after severely blighted street for 15 minutes, with surroundings not improving, my concern grew. We finally got within 1/4 mile of the Chik-fil-A, just as we crossed onto the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff campus.
"Babe, did you make me drive through Murderville just to get to a student union?"
Indeed, the Chik-fil-A was inside a student union...and that student union was closed.
As we were running severely low on gas, I commandeered the GPS map, looked for a highway out, and found an area on the fringes of town with restaurants, gas stations, and a shopping mall. We passed a beautiful lake and park and reached the area I'd seen on the map, but most of the restaurants, half the gas stations, and the entirety of the apocalyptic ruins of the shopping mall were closed and blighted. I pulled up to one of the operating gas stations, was immediately approached by an extra from the Walking Dead, said a very definitive "NO" to the question the extra asked me, pumped the gas, and got the hell out of there. The only restaurant that seemed open and safe for entry was a Wendy's in the shadow of the dead mall. We all had to pee and we were all starving, so we just went for it. 

We were immediately met by a dystopian sight: the ice machine inside the drink dispenser was malfunctioning and endlessly shooting out ice cubes, which had formed a mound directly under the drink spouts, then spilled on the floor into a giant frozen mountain. We almost turned around and left, except there was no other place for us to go. We took turns going to the bathroom, and rather shockingly, the restrooms were spotless and clean. We then ordered our food, and the sweet girl at the counter turned her monitor around so that my wife could see the salad dressing options. Outside of the malfunctioning drink machine, this was one swell Wendy's, even if its surrounded by Pine Bluff. 

We got our food, wading through ice mountain to get our drinks (I got a peach Mello Yello and my son got something red), made it back to the road, and ate on the drive, the most delicious Wendy's I've had, though I never once looked into the rearview until we were miles south of Pine Bluff, a city that I learned after doing some later research is not only far more dangerous than Baton Rouge, but 4th in violent crimes in all of America, with a rate of 1,098 per 100,000 people, which is somehow almost TWICE that of New Orleans! HOLY SHIT

The rest of the drive through the beautiful day was pleasant and fairly unremarkable. We took a bathroom break at the rest stop area at the bluff/river overlook in Vidalia, Louisiana, a spot I've mentioned before here is special to me, so it was especially more special now that I'd taken my family there. ...er, I mean the overlook, not the bathroom...obviously. We were then in the homestretch, driving through Natchez, then reaching the glorious Highway 61, the greatest road in the country, riding it over the state border all the way back to Baton Rouge, where we never found my wallet, and which doesn't have cool mountains or hot springs, but is home nonetheless. At least it isn't San Francisco.