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Did We Really Just Spend a Week in Arkansas?

 The road through eastern Oklahoma/the Choctaw Nation is a long strip of kind of cheesy resort places for quite a distance. The town of Broken Bow is proud of the fact that their casino complex has the only Starbucks within 70 miles—a dubious honor. There were sketchy zoos and mini golf and other oddball roadside attractions for miles. Then we got into the Ouachita Mountains and some beautiful scenery.


The Ouachita Mountains in Arkansas

We stopped at a lot of overlooks, including one that had the Monument of Three Sticks. Not kidding, that’s what it was called. The plaque said the sticks represent the water, land, and trees of the area, and was put up by a group encouraging development, which seemed counterintuitive. But I do like an odd monument.


The Monument of Three Sticks

We stopped for gas and fried pies in a little wide spot in the road called Smithville—or Octavia, hard to say exactly—and the clerks admired our Scamp, as often happens. We are a novelty on the road and in campgrounds. Then on to our turnoff to Queen Wilhelmina Lodge. The story goes that a fellow named Arthur Stillwell wanted to build a railroad, but he couldn’t get funding. He met someone from the Netherlands who was willing to put up the money, so when he saw the top of Rich Mountain and thought it would make a great place for a resort that people could come to on his railroad, he named it after the new queen of the Netherlands. They even built a suite of rooms fit for a queen to entice her to visit the inn. She never did. The original lodge fell into disrepair fairly quickly, and it wasn’t till the late 1950s that the state of Arkansas decided to make the area a park; they built a new lodge that opened in 1963. The lodge burned to the ground in the 1970s, so the place we stayed is the third Queen Wilhelmina Inn.


A bear in the lobby of the Queen Wilhelmina Lodge

Arthur Stillwell believed he had “hunches,” and one of them concerned the route of his railroad. At the time (1898), Galveston was a big port, due south, and it would make sense to run the railroad south to Galveston. But Arthur dreamed a hunch that told him a great wall of water would sweep over Galveston, so he built his own city, Port Arthur, Texas, to be the terminus of the railroad. He was right—in 1900, a hurricane hit Galveston in one of the largest natural disasters ever to hit the United States. However, he was not always right, and his railroad was not a huge success, nor was the inn on the top of Rich Mountain. One other weird fact about Arthur is that when he died of a heart attack in his apartment in New York City, his wife threw herself off the balcony of the apartment, perhaps inspired by a legend of Rich Mountain about an Indian maiden who jumped off the Lover’s Leap overlook when her warrior lover did not return from a battle. Um, well, maybe?


The view from Lover’s Leap on Rich Mountain

We had a nice stay, hiked some trails around the lodge to an overlook and to a crazy stone house called “the Wonder House,” with nine rooms on six levels. The sunsets were amazing the first couple of nights, then the clouds and storms and WIND rolled in. By Sunday, there was thunder, hail, and mid-afternoon, the power went out. That wasn’t so terrible, though. The kitchen had a gas or propane grill and could make sandwiches, and while we ate dinner, the power came back on. Thank heavens for the Ouachita Lineman.


A beautiful sunset at Queen Wilhelmina Lodge

On Monday morning, the weather was looking a bit better—sunny skies and no fog, though it was still darn windy, and quite chilly. Our next stop was Hot Springs, Arkansas, the location of a strange National Park. The park encompasses most of the downtown area, or at least the upper part, also known as Bathhouse Row. Some of the old buildings and hotels along the road offer some wonderful examples of Beaux Arts architecture from the late 19th century. In its day, Hot Springs hosted major league baseball spring training, mobsters such as Al Capone, illegal gambling, horse racing, and speakeasies during Prohibition.


Bathhouse Row in Hot Springs

What it doesn’t have is much parking, and certainly no parking that could accommodate a van hauling a very small camper. I had been there 25 years ago with my sister and our kids, in high summer, and I don’t remember it being anywhere near as crowded as it is today. Back then, we parked easily and walked around, and I remember the kids jumping into basins along the street with spring water in them. (I think.) This time, we just drove through on a busy street, turned around above town, drove back through, and laughed at the banners advertising the “World’s Shortest St. Patrick’s Day Parade” (we were there on March 16).


Hot Springs claims to have the world’s shortest
St. Patrick’s Day Parade. I cannot confirm that,
because we were only in the town on March 16.

That concluded our stop at the Hot Springs National Park. I did learn that the hot springs flow from Hot Springs Mountain, on the western side of town, and the mountain is part of the Ouchita range, which is the same mountain range we were in at Queen Wilhelmina State Park. I also learned that the big hulking building overlooking “Bathhouse Row” was built in 1933 as the second Army-Navy hospital. The Army and Navy moved on, apparently, and the state of Arkansas operated it for more than 60 years, first as the Hot Springs Rehabilitation Center, then for a short time as the Arkansas Career Training Institute. That closed in 2019, and to quote Wikipedia, “It is unclear as to who currently is the owner of the property.”


The old Army Navy Hospital,
now orphaned and empty

We went on to Little Rock for the night, and the next morning we completed our tour of Arkansas (I believe we were there for just a day shy of a week) and crossed over into the bootheel of Missouri. And I conclude that Arkansas is a nice state with lovely mountains and beautiful sunsets.

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