Nashville TN, to Little Rock, AR

Tuesday, Sept. 29th, 2020

This morning Johnny & Stacie and Gary & I pulled out of Cedar Creek Campground but not before Gary & I had morning visitors in the form of geese… 2 geese and a duck who wanted to be fed, and they were not taking no for an answer. They showed up when Gary was starting to put items away outside. I went to get some bread and Gary was too slow in giving it to them and the big goose started pecking on him. Apparently he/she was the shake down artist for the threesome. We finally got them fed and explained no more food would be coming their way this morning, and they moved along to shake down some other poor unsuspecting camper. 

We crossed over into Arkansas to stay at Tom Sawyer RV Park in West Memphis directly on the Mississippi River. Just a beautiful spot to watch barge traffic and hear passing trains! So peaceful! We spent the afternoon relaxing and Stacie and I walked the campground and climbed the treehouse that’s on the property. It’s very cool… built into a tree and overlooking the Mississippi River. 

Our turn to cook dinner, and we all enjoyed the beautiful moon rising over the river in the evening. 

Wednesday, Sept. 30th, 2020

This morning we weren’t going very far… just 146 miles west on I-40 so we had a leisurely morning. I worked on the blog, responded to some emails and Gary made breakfast for us. J&S visited the Bass Pro Shop In Memphis which is in a very cool pyramid building. We’d been there before so opted to stay put. We all left shortly after lunch (independently) in route to Maumelle Park, a Corp of Engineer Park, in Little Rock. By mutual agreement, we don’t caravan with J&S. The four of us agree that it works best if we all leave when we want, follow our own GPS, take rest stops when we want, and link up at our next destination. 

Today Gary & I are happily driving along about 40 minutes from our destination of Maumelle when a passing motorist gets our attention. He’s putting his two hands together sideways. We don’t quite know what he means, but obviously we have a problem of some sort. Gary mimes a thank you to him, pulls over to stop on busy I-40 and realizes we have a tire quickly going flat on the RV. Wonderful. I look up Truck Fuel Stops on our AllStays app. We’re hoping to put air in the tire to re-inflate it (fingers crossed that’s all it is). As luck would have it, there was a Love’s Travel Stop 5 miles down the road. We manage to drive there and pull into the busy truck stop. No easy feat! Now what?! I flag down one of the worker bees and she indicates all the truck fueling bays have tire air filling stations. A trucker who was walking past saw the problem and tried to help… saying “no they don’t all have air.” He walked with us to see which bays had air. We found one. Then we had to get back into the truck and drive back around to get in line for that fueling bay. (For the record, both gentlemen who were nice enough to offer assistance were African American… the passing motorist and the trucker. People are kind. Skin color makes no difference.)

It’s finally our turn at the fueling bay and Gary realizes the air hose is broken. It’s just spewing out air into the air…. no way to fill a tire. But, there’s an AC plug and we have an air compressor. Gary manages to fill up the tire with air, and hears it coming back out, and realizes there’s a big hunk of metal embedded in the tire. Marvelous. It’s holding air but probably not for too long. I look up tire repair shops and call the first Firestone listed in the area and explain the situation. They can’t fit us in their parking lot. We’re too big. But he says there’s another Firestone in a mall. I get the address and realize it’s only about 10 minutes from us. Okie dokie… let’s hope the tire holds until we get there. It does. We pull in, and they were able to patch it and we were on the road again about an hour later. Yay! (Ordinarily our Tire Pressure Monitoring System should have flagged that the tire was going low but we had noticed it wasn’t working properly on this trip. A new monitoring system is now on order.)

I had been texting Stacie to let her know what was going on. J&S offered to come get us if need be, but no need. We got to Maumelle about 4 PM. 

We had a back-in site right on the Arkansas River and backed in just fine. Lovely spot! Terrific campground and this one was only $15 a night. Stacie was nice enough to prepare dinner for all of us. A tinfoil supper… everything cooked in tinfoil on the grill… meat, potatoes, veggies. Yum! We relaxed with a view of the river and were treated to some barge traffic, a couple of eagles flying overhead and about 50-75 white pelicans that came in for the night about a 1/3  of a mile away on a flat outcropping on the river. Not close enough for good pictures unfortunately. 

Beautiful moon rise over the river… not quite a full moon but very close.

Thursday, October 1

Did I mention that the houses leading up to Maumelle appear to be $1 million mansions? Gorgeous! Never seen anything like it! 

We woke up to see Johnny fishing off the little outcropping near our site. J&S are WAY earlier risers than we are, and get all kinds of things accomplished before we’re even awake and moving! Alas, he didn’t catch anything.  

Today the four of us headed into Little Rock with our bikes to ride along the Riverfront. Absolutely beautiful area! Little Rock has 16 miles of biking along the Arkansas River Trail and an additional 100 miles of bike trails in the nearby area. It’s unbelievable. We biked about 5 miles and crossed over two pedestrian bridges, Broadway Street Bridge and Clinton Presidential Street Bridge… taking pictures along the way. We enjoyed urban tacos for lunch outside at Diablos, a downtown Mexican restaurant. Then walked up the 3rd and final pedestrian bridge named Junction Bridge. To end our downtown adventure, we wandered through the beautiful free Vogel Schwartz Sculpture Garden. Just a fabulous sculpture garden with over 90 works on display… all with a backdrop of the Arkansas River. Simply dazzling. Just a remarkable downtown area! We were all blown away. We also saw the building that houses the Clinton Library but I believe it was closed because of Covid. Another time we would love to explore that. 

We made it back to the campground and sat outside and relaxed, and watched the white pelicans again… there were more tonight than last night. Looked like hundreds but again they were at a distance. 

Gary took the drone out (new purchase this summer) and played with it for a bit with all of us offering helpful suggestions. Stacie wanted him to fly it across the river and spy on the fancy house on the hillside. We did not do that. However, below is a short drone video that Gary took that day. For the full affect, turn your sound up.

A gorgeous full moon tonight over the river. Wow.

Friday, October 2, 2020

Today we all decided to walk the Big Dam Bridge at the Murray Lock & Dam. We took Overlook Drive to get there and the homes over this hilly road are unbelievable…. big, beautiful, and with gorgeous views of the Arkansas River, the bridge and the dam. The Big Dam Bridge is the longest pedestrian/biking bridge in the world at almost a mile long and 90 feet above the Arkansas River. It’s also the only bridge ever built into a dam. Very cool! We walked across the bridge and found a spot to eat our picnic lunch then walked back across the bridge in time to watch 6 barges (lashed 2 abreast) 600 ft. long being pushed by a tug entering the lock. The lock filled with 18 ft. of water and then released the barge on to the other side and off it went. This whole process took about an hour. So interesting!

Then it was time for ice cream at Loblolly’s in downtown Little Rock. While eating ice cream, we stumbled upon another free sculpture garden, the Bernice Garden. This one much smaller than yesterday’s… but still. So impressive. We also stumbled upon a Purse Museum. We didn’t go in but the outside of the building was striking. (Picture below ).

We did a quick drive through Pinnacle Mountain which isn’t far from the campground. But since we leave tomorrow there’s no time for any hikes there. Reason to come back… as if we need one. We’re all completely smitten with Little Rock. A remarkable city. We’ll be back to stay at this beautiful Corp. of Engineer Park and visit this wonderful city again. 

Another evening of grilling and chillin’. Another beautiful moon rising. We’re getting very spoiled with these.

Saturday, October 3, 2020

Today we had to say goodbye to Little Rock and Maumelle Park, but we didn’t have far to go so it was a leisurely morning. We were only going 124 miles further on I-40 West to Aux Arc (pronounced Ozark) Corp Park in Ozark, Arkansas and check-in was after 3 pm. Gary and I took the opportunity to walk around Maumelle in the morning to mark down our favorite sites for when we come back again. We got a 2 mile walk in and Johnny did it with us. Stacie stayed behind to give Niky a brushing. 

We had a short 2 hour drive over to Aux Arc. This corp. park, too, is located on the Arkansas River on a dam. 

Once again, this was a “contactless” park entry. I did manage to score a map to see where the sites were located. We met Johnny & Stacie coming down the campground road from the opposite direction, which was helpful because they were able to let us know that there was a turn around so that we could all be backing into our sites from a better direction. The park host had neglected to mention that. We were in the older section of the campground. Sites were narrow and very, very long and curvy with large trees on either side. J&S have a small RV and Johnny has been driving work trailers forever. He can back into a site in a nanosecond. If only… this was a cluster of a back-in experience. Ugh. Some days are good, some days not so good. We had one neighbor coming over to “help” us. He may have been helpful if he was sober. As it was… not so much. But he meant well. You can imagine that marital bliss is in short supply when this is happening. But we finally got parked, heaved a sigh of relief and started talking to each other again. 

We did have a fabulous view of the river with a train track across the way. We saw various trains with 2 or 3 or 4 engines pulling about 125 cars. The trains spanned the horizon as far as the eye could see across the Arkansas River. Very cool! I love the sound of trains! There was also barge traffic to entertain us. The rest of the afternoon was spent relaxing with leftovers for dinner. 

I neglected to mention the hitchhikers we had on this trip. They’ve been with us since NH. Six baby mice and a mama mouse living in the under bay area. It took a little doing but we think they are all gone now. Enough said.  

Sunday, October 4th, 2020

We woke up to seeing flashing lights several sites down from us. We found out later that a gentleman had woken up not feeling well, gone to the bathroom, sat down on his sofa and died. The poor wife. He was 62. You just never know… By the time we got going, the emergency vehicles were all gone. 

We also woke up to beautiful mist/fog on the water… the temps must have been just right. 

Stacie and I did a 2 mile power walk around the campground while the boys did a more leisurely walk around the campground and spent some time at the dam. They struck up a conversation with one of the worker’s and found out where we could have better views of the dam since the one at the campground is surrounded by a fence.

Today we drove the 19 mile Pig Trail Scenic Byway with Stacie behind the wheel, which winds through the Boston and Ozark Mountains. It’s considered one of the best motorcycle rides in the country. It’s narrow, very winding, and very hilly and covered with tree canopy. The leaves weren’t quite changing color yet so we missed out on seeing that. I sometimes have motion sickness issues but I was fine. Gary on the other hand was feeling a tad queasy… or so he complained. It was a fun ride. Afterwards we had lunch outdoors at the Ork Burger Company and had a fabulous waitress and a great lunch. Then we drove to the Ozark-Jeta Taylor Lock & Dam to walk by the river, view the dam, and look at rocks and driftwood. We also had the pleasure of watching a train passing directly in front of us as we were leaving. A fun outing! And we enjoyed a campfire that night. First time we pulled out the propane fire pit on this trip.

Monday, October 5th, 2020

Today was our last day with Johnny & Stacie. Tomorrow we part company and go in different directions. We had a leisurely morning and had breakfast together. Gary made French Toast and Stacie contributed bacon and we had fruit, so something healthy!  We all did a walk around the campground to mark down favorite campsites. This campground is interesting. We would come back because the river is great, it’s peaceful, and a quiet oasis. But…. there is a bit of a Deliverance vibe here. Sooooo…. we’d come back but stay in a section where the Deliverance vibe isn’t as prevalent. At $10 a night, this campground is a bargain and gets a lot of locals. 

After our walk-about the campground, we drove over to the dam where we were at yesterday but this time we went to the Overlook then did a hike along the River Bluff Nature Trail at Reed Mountain Park. Lovely hike down a series of re-constructed stairs then along a path not far from the water then back up again. We were all huffing and puffing except for Johnny. 

Afterwards we came back to our respective campsites, had lunch, rested for a bit then played corn hole in the afternoon with a backdrop of the Arkansas River and a beverage in hand. A fun afternoon! 

Stacie made a delicious Chicken Alfredo dinner, and we had to say our goodbyes this evening…. hard to believe our 2+ weeks together have come to an end. We were all in tears but will stay in touch and look forward to seeing each other again in Galveston in 5 months. 

Tomorrow Johnny & Stacie move on to other parts of Arkansas and Georgia before they head back home in a few weeks to North Carolina, and tomorrow we are headed to Oklahoma City.