It was westward across Oklahoma, the Texas Panhandle and New Mexico headed for the Pod hospital in Albuquerque. My precious Pod blew her Freon top in the AC unit and the Ladies wanted the good guys at Vantastic Vans to fix her. We also needed a new windshield due to a big ‘owie’ back in Minnesota or somewhere. We’ll be wintering in NM and maybe parts of Texas so it may actually get warm enough for the AC. I just love how they always keep things ready to go for any anticipated need I may have; after all it is really all about me, you know!
As we were leaving Arkansas we took this lovely scenic drive up into the Ouachita (remember that’s Wash-i-ta!) Mountains on the border of AK and OK, along Hwy. 88/1. This road was the pass for wagons and later the railroad. We stopped at the Queen Wilhelmina State Park and Lodge. The railroad was built in the late 1880’s with funds from investors in Holland. The Lodge was built in the 1890’s and named in honor of Holland’s Queen. It only operated for about 5 years and then stood vacant for nearly 70 years. It was acquired by the State and completely renovated, suffered a devastating fire and was rebuilt again. It is quite a posh place now but we were cozy in the howling mountain winds in our great survival Pod! The drive, the colors and the fresh air were well worth the trip.
We had decided we wanted to get to New Mexico before the big arctic storm forecast to arrive in the Midwest in a few days. So we did the ‘peddle to the metal’ routine straight westward to Sulfur, OK for one night in the Chickasaw National Recreation Area. I had wished we could have stayed a while in this area of springs, streams and lakes as it was a very rich smelling place full of wildlife and natural beauty.
Then it was another hurry day to Lawton, OK and the Wichita (this time it’s Witch-i-ta!) Mountains National Wildlife Refuge for a couple of nights. This was a fun place for me because I could hike the trails and swim in these small, deep little lakes. We drove up to Scott Mountain for a spectacular 360 degree view of the surrounding states.
Always hopping, never stopping, it was onto Texas and a one night stand in the city park at Childress. On the way we saw these really ‘Texas-sized’ cotton bales; like boxcar sized bales. So Cokie stopped at a cotton farm (?) right on the highway and got permission to photograph their bales out in the field. Bet that Lady shook her head and probably made some comment about Californians!
Bam – hardly time to whiz the next morning and we were back on the road with our collective noses pointed south-west and full go until we finally stopped at Lake Brantley State Park, New Mexico! Whew! We made it just in time to catch the danged snow storm that hit the next day. I swear we did all that traveling just to get to one of the few places in the Southwest that got snow! Go figure! Oh well, it made for a nice cozy Thanksgiving Day in the marvelous Pod. Kae sure filled our little house with great smells and even better leftovers! We were happy and thankful! 
We rested and waited out the storm then decided that we would save a trip to the Carlsbad Caverns until early January when we plan to meet up with our good friends Margaret and Anita and my buddies, Mike and Jake. We’ll take the tours together and maybe travel over to the bird sanctuaries in Texas. It was off toward Albuquerque for Pod repairs with a bit more storm stopping at Roswell and Bottomless Lakes State Park. This is truly an ‘alien’ area and not just because of the “incident” in 1947! We spent some time walking around Roswell and let me tell you they sure do capitalize on the little green men thing. Bad art and worse souvenirs are everywhere! The Ladies decided to check out the “real” story by visiting the UFO Museum and Research Center in downtown Roswell. Developed in 1991 by an ex-army officer, a local mortician and a real estate developer to fill the public’s intensifying appetite for credible information, the museum soon gained international attention and non-profit status. The exhibits are extensive and cover the whimsical to the documented. You can obtain more information on their website at www.roswellufomuseum.com. The gals said after viewing the evidence, artifacts and documentation it was easy to believe we had had a visit. I say, “Why not? Hey, hurry back, we need all the help we can get!”
There is a lot of history in this area, besides the UFO thing. There is the Chisum Trail named after John Chisum, a great cattle baron of the nineteenth century and one of Roswell’s founding fathers. The Apaches were part of the early history too and the current Mescalero Apache Reservation is a viable, neighboring community.
We spent several days at Bottomless Lakes State Park. The Lakes got their name because nineteenth century cowboys, who stopped to water their livestock in the area, tried to find the bottom of some of the pools with their lariats tied together but their ropes were swept aside by underground currents, so they decided the lakes were bottomless. They are actually a chain of eight sinkholes, or cenotes, that range from 17 to 90 feet deep. They were formed when circulating water dissolved the gypsum and salt deposits to form subterranean caverns. Eventually the roofs collapsed, sinkholes formed and filled with water. 
Well, we watched the weather pretty closely and decided we better keep moving north and west to Albuquerque, toward the repair guys. So off we dashed to an RV Park we knew in Tijeras, just east of Albuquerque. We stayed there for about a week waiting for parts and repairs. Since none of that was very interesting I thought we would end this blog with a trip to The Albuquerque Museum of Art and History to view the exhibit “Tombs and Temples, Treasures of Egyptian Art from the British Museum”. It was so difficult to comprehend that some of these works of such beauty and sophistication were created nearly 4,000 years ago! They prohibited photography so the Ladies tried to scan and reproduce some of the photos from the brochure. Enjoy!
Well, there you are and here we are – Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo, NM. We hope your holidazes were joyous and jolly! Thanks for coming along with us on our adventures this year. We plan to tour the eastern portion of our magnificent country in 2008 and we hope that you will traipse along with us through that set of adventures. Hey, if any of you want us to visit any particularly special place in the East, just email us, tell us where and we will try our best to get there and photograph it for you and include it in a blog. Be well, be healthy, be happy and most of all – be loving!!!
We drove out of Tecumseh, MO across the border and straight to the Ozark National Forest and Blanchard Springs Caverns. Those of you who have traveled with us for the past two years know that we have visited a number of caverns. Each of them has been wondrous in its own right and we had agreed that our favorite was Jewel Cave in North Dakota. Well, that has now definitely changed! Blanchard Springs Caverns is spectacular! The variety and size of the formations is hard to believe. The Forest Service waited until 1974 before opening the cave to the public taking their time to properly map, inventory, light and develop the caverns. This means that the formations are intact and show no signs of vandalism or insensitive rock hounding. There are no signs of graffiti and the lighting is a grand addition to the colors and scenes throughout the cave. 
We walked around some of the trails in this lovely recreation area including the one down to the springhead itself. Even though we know this area is in the middle of a drought we were amazed by the amount of water in these springs and creeks. Then I remembered that this was not recent water we saw gushing forth but rather water that has sometimes spent thousands of years percolating down through the cracks and fissures in the stone. We had been told that in some cases the water can be as much as 4,000 years old! Not only do some of these places smell old, I can attest that they actually taste old too!
Our goal was to go directly west from Blanchard Caverns to Harrison and the beginnings of Scenic Byway 7, but we decided to continue in this Buffalo River Wilderness area for a day or two. Off we went west-northwest on Hwy. 14 toward the ghost town of Rush and a little campground there. This was an interesting area with lots of foundations and walls made of the local sandstone. It was a large zinc carbonate mining area from the 1880’s until about 1920. The heydays were during WW1 when there was a great demand for zinc as it was used in the smelting of brass and bronze for shell casings and weapons. Upwards of 5,000 people called these gulches and gullies home for a few years, then they left as quickly as they had come. Personally, I found the scenery along Highway 14 a whole lot more to my liking. So I asked Cokie to take few shots of those kinds of things rather than the falling down stuff.
It was onward on Hwy.14 north to Yellville then westward as we worked our way to Harrison and Scenic Highway 7, “the heart of the Arkansas Ozarks”. This is a very steep, winding, gorgeous, north-south running road that entertained us mile after mile after mile. Kae loves to drive these rural, hill country roller coasters but I have to tell you, my tummy sometimes just doesn’t agree! We found fun, funny places like Dogpatch and Booger Hollow and even the “Grand Canyon of the Ozarks” just south of Jasper. This was truly the best of the Ozarks country vistas. It was here that the fall colors were finally starting to show too!
We camped at Lake Dardanelle near Russellville on the Arkansas River for two or three days then continued our trek down the road to famous Hot Springs, Arkansas, childhood home of President William Jefferson Clinton.
We parked out in the Gulpha Gulch Campground for about a week so we would have plenty of time to explore and ‘soak up’ the place. This has got to be one of the best and the most unique of the National Parks that we have seen so far. For one thing I could walk all over the place with the gals; most unusual for a National Park, but then the whole living town is the park! This area was originally set aside by the Federal Government as a reservation in 1832 to preserve the hot springs and natural beauty of the area. So this year the National Park Service celebrated 175 years of responsibility to ‘protect and preserve’ this national treasure!
Under that mandate to protect and preserve, the Park Service began a massive restoration project, in 2004, of several of the remaining elegant bathhouses on Bath House Row. These beauties were built during the hey day of Hot Springs - 1880 to 1950 - then modern medical discoveries made “taking the waters” a thing of the past. By1985 there was only one bath house still open, the Buckstaff. The Ladies simply had to stop at the Buckstaff for a couple of hours to do the hot mineral water bath routine and fill all of our jugs with this “wondrous elixir” drawn straight from the bowels of the earth and served at various public fountains in the heart of town. (Dang fine water when it cools down from 143 degrees, otherwise I discovered that it is a real nose blisterer!)
The National Park Visitors Center is housed in the completely restored Fordyce Bathhouse. In 1915, when it opened, the Fordyce was touted as the best that Hot Springs had to offer. Now you can tour all four floors and see it in its original splendor. Empty since 1962 it was reopened in1989 with all of the women’s and part of the men’s side outfitted with the furnishings and equipment of the time: steam cabinets, tubs, massage tables, sitz tubs, the Hubbard Tub, hydro-therapy equipment, billiard table, piano, marble benches, stained glass ceilings, marble and tile work. It really is quite elegant and Cokie had so much fun photographing all of it.
What makes this water hot? Well, this is NOT a volcanic region. The water is heated by a different process. Rainfall percolates down through the cracks and fissures in the outcroppings of chert and Novaculite. The water is conducted deep into the earth; estimates are as deep as 8,000 feet. As it descends it is heated by increasingly hotter rocks, about 4 degrees every 300 feet. Eventually the water encounters faults and cracks leading back up to the lower west slope of Hot Springs Mountain where it surfaces.
One day we took a drive up one of the most incredibly twisted, switched-backed, doubled-up, narrow, one-way roads I had ever been on, just to see the Hot Springs Mountain Tower. This is a 261 foot platform that Cokie wanted to use for vista photos of the area. Personally I hate heights, so I dozed and they observed; works for me!
We were actually killing a few days waiting for mail so we took off for some R&R in the forest west of Hot Springs to spend time in the quietude of Lake Ouachita (Ha! Bet you tried to pronounce it with a Mexican flare, huh? Well, you ain’t from here, are yall? It is Lake Wash-i-ta!). Our expectations were more than fulfilled. This is a lovely, large lake with oodles of bays and fjords, campgrounds and hiking trails. We spent two weeks just mellowing in the cooler weather, watching the changing season. Finally I could feel, see and smell the fall of this beautiful year. The Ladies met a neat local gal named Maria who stopped to talk about the wonderful Pod and her dream of taking off on the open road. She turned out to be lots of fun for hikes, firewood and information on the area. It’s always so much fun to meet these nice folks along the way. We get to share our adventures and experiences, they share their dreams and I get extra hugs. Life is great!
Westward, ever westward! It’s off to Oklahoma and the way open road.
