Chapter 52 - Alabama to Arkansas
April 25, 2000
3/23 We finally left Florida - a short move from Pensacola, Florida, to Mobile, Alabama. It's about 80 miles up the Interstate, but we took a longer and slower route, passing through Summerdale, Alabama to look the Escapees RV Park there (very nice), and then heading west to Mobile Bay, where we poked our way north along the waterfront until we joined Interstate 10 to cross the tidal flats at the head of the bay into Mobile. We stopped at Brown's Mobile Home and RV Park, on the west edge of Mobile.
3/24 The Mobile Botanical Gardens is small (or at least the landscaped portion is small), and is not well maintained. But it provided a pleasant walk in the woods and a chance to enjoy and identify some unfamiliar plants and trees. The tiny flowers on the flaming yellow and orange azaleas made a bold statement in the weak spring sunshine. The vines in Kudzu Canyon were still dormant and ugly.
The Mobile Museum of Art was also surprisingly small for such a large city. A major expansion project is just beginning, and most of the outdoor sculpture garden has been dismantled and stored in preparation for the new construction. Some portions of the art collection were quite interesting.
A 1991 Petroglyphic Urn with Horn done in 1991 by William Morris, was greatly enhanced by the liner notes: "…a rock climber, hiker and bow hunter, Morris has written of visiting native American burial sites in his native California…his interest is in the romance and mystery of the sites…his creative intention is not to replicate anything he has seen, but to create objects which he would like to find." And what a stunning find this piece would be, with its white cave-art horses with gold leaf and blue/brown/green dyes swirled into the blown and hot worked glass.
A large green ceramic cotta bowl by Wm Day Gates of the American Terra Cotta and Ceramic Company, 1900, rocked me back on my heels. After using a nearly identical piece for a houseplant container, I got rid of it when we sold our house. The liner note said something about Frank Lloyd Wright contributing to some of their designs. So did I loose something precious? I'll never know, since museums don't put price tags on their displays.
We have been enjoying the sculptures by Isamu Noguchi found in nearly all the sculpture gardens. A note at this museum was interesting. He is quoted "My Japanese background gave me a sensibility for the simple. It taught me how to do more with less." By WWI, Noguchi was a world famous artist, but went voluntarily to a relocation center with other Americans of Japanese descent. Three of his works were on the lawn, the bronze Bird's Song, Rain Mountain, and Prototype in hot-dipped galvanized steel, and, Awakening, done in Botticino marble. His best works are in granite, but these were also good.
Oakleigh, an 1833 mansion was "just another mansion". Am I getting jaded? The needlework in a temporary exhibition was draped over everything, so the entire place seemed cluttered. I suppose, for 1833, this was an extraordinary house. A trip to Bellingrath gardens served to convince me that my first evaluation when we were here two years ago is still correct: Lots of pretty detail, but no grand landscape design.
The Mobile area does not appear prosperous as we drive around. And the newspapers are full of acrimonious disputes about how to fund government services and the city and county schools in the face of decreasing tax revenues.
3/25 Three hours of expressway driving brought us to Montgomery. The land gradually rose as we moved north. The expressway initially was raised on mile after mile of causeway across the cypress swamps, occasionally rising high over a navigable river. Later, the terrain became drier, with gently rolling hills, and the pine forests alternated with a mixed deciduous forest.
Spring has sprung. The deciduous trees are leafing out, each species with its own shade of pale green - contrasting strongly with the deeper greens of the pine trees and the very dark glossy foliage of the evergreen magnolias. Dogwood trees are common in the understory, flowers chalk white among the greens. Every few miles, we see acres of wisteria, climbing high in the trees beside the road then dangling their blooms in dense cascades of lavender-blue. We presume that the wisteria are escapees from old plantations, but no other signs of human habitation remain visible in the dense forest.
Nearly every yard has at least one huge azalea bush, solidly covered with intense magenta flowers. Some places have dense azalea hedges extending for hundreds of feet. Occasionally we see other colors, but the old-fashioned large flowered magenta variety is by far the most common.
We drove directly to the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, stopping briefly to look at the State Theatre complex, the spectacular home of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. The theater is a lavish no-expense-spared structure, built with a huge private grant - one of the most elaborate such buildings we've seen. (It's actually two indoor theaters and an interestingly designed thatched-roofed open-sided outdoor stage.
The Art Museum is also a lavish building, build initially to house the private Blount collection of 41 historical American paintings, many of which we very much enjoyed. A large exhibition area houses traveling collections - currently showing a large Edward Hopper collection.
Interesting views out the windows of the museum had been created: one with a herd of steel animals on a lush green hillside; one with both real and sculpted children playing beside a bubbling pond surrounded by Beatrix Potter-like sculptures of rabbits and turtles; one with real people feeding the black swans near the shore of an acre-sized lake; one with swooping loops of gold-colored metal reflected in the water of that lake, the loops moving gently in the breeze or under the weight of the cormorants (real birds) perching on them. (I wondered if the artist who designed these mobiles planned that the birds would use them and if the momentum of the birds when landing was taken into account in the design. The birds didn't seem at all bothered when the loops rotated 60 degrees or more on their support posts.) Best of all were the 30 or so happy people standing at the railing on the terrace overlooking all this or on the grass beside the lake.
As we left the museum, a search of our three campground directories didn't find a convenient place to spend the night, so we checked the yellow pages, found a local Wal-Mart, and drove the few miles. We parked in an outlying section of their parking lot, dropped off two rolls of film for one-hour developing, did a little shopping, and picked up a pizza for dinner (we had our choice of two different pizza places, each a short walk across the parking lot). This one-stop convenience makes Wal-Mart a favorite among RVers.
Wal-Mart welcomes RVers and is happy to have them to spend the night, except in a few communities which have ordinances forbidding this practice (and the entire state of Illinois, which currently claims that state health laws prohibit sleeping in an RV except in a licensed campground). I had a brief chat with the parking lot security patrol and the store manager to verify this. Within an hour of our arrival, two more RVs had pulled in nearby. Security-conscious RVers particularly like the brightly-lit parking lot and the Wal-Mart employees who continuously circulate through the parking lot in conspicuous little trucks with amber lights on the roof.
These tend to be rather noisy nights. In this case, a huge roaring brush/vacuum cleaner machine systematically swept the entire parking lot at 3am. The store is open 24 hours a day, and so there were occasional vehicles coming and going and loud voices near the store off and on all night. And as in most such places, we are parked quite near a busy highway.
3/26 "Jasmine Hill Gardens & Outdoor Museum, near Wetumpka, Alabama, is a 17-acre garden adorned with statues, fountains and other art objects from Greece and Italy. Of particular interest is a copy of the Temple of Hera in Olympia, Greece." This description in Map'n'Go made us expect kitsch. Their brochure says that in 1996 the Olympic Flame originated at Olympia, Greece's ancient Temple of Hera ruins and came to the world's only full scale reproduction at Jasmine Hill's temple - on its way to the Games in Atlanta. That made us expect commercial hype, too. The visitor's center in a cheaply-built gaudy imitation of said Temple wasn't encouraging. But, we were wrong about the rest. Once we got away from the Visitor's Center, the grounds were graceful and the classical sculptures artfully placed. Many were copies of copies of famous pieces, but they were good copies, and were worked in materials that held up to the weather and seemed only slightly exotic in the colorful gardens.
As is true with many of our cultural treasures, Jasmine Hill was started by a wealthy couple as their private estate, and the quality of the experience in such a place depends on the esthetic sensibilities and artistic abilities of the original owner. Jasmine Hill overcomes the preposterousness of imitation Greece treasures in America. The copy of the ruined Temple of Hera is beautifully placed in a suitably scaled greensward enclosed with tall evergreens. Authentic olive and wine jars are scattered throughout the gardens, with Venus de Milo, a bust of Homer, statuette of Athena, bronze bust of Socrates, Donatello's lions, Goat and Piping Pan from Pompeii, and lots of other statues placed at the nexus of pathways lined with colorful shrubs. Nike of Samothrace was especially appealing at the end of a reflecting pool, more memorable than when we saw the original at the Louvre in Paris. All in all, an unexpected and delightful find for us.
3/26 The drive to Moundville, Alabama was along US 82, a couple of hours of pleasant rural highway. We arrived at Moundville Archaeological Park fairly early and found the campground almost empty. We chose a pleasant full-hookup site (only $10/night) beside a cascade of wisteria blooms extending 100 feet or so through the pine trees behind our site. A small museum contains artifacts from the mounds and relates the historical story pieced together by archaeologists.
The many mounds are flat-topped pyramids up to 70 feet high, most of which were originally topped by multiple dwellings. The civilization here was at its peak around 1200 AD, and collapsed about a century later for unknown reasons. Around 10,000 people lived in this valley - 3000 of them in this single community. Extensive trade routes connected this community to others, as far south as the Gulf of Mexico and north into Illinois (but apparently never reached to the contemporaneous communities in Mexico and the Southwest.)
We find it interesting that this civilization collapsed at the same time as the "Anasazi" communities in the Southwest. This was not pointed out in any of the literature at the museum. Was the long drought that is implicated in the Anasazi collapse (and documented by tree ring data) also a factor in the East? Again, no mention of this. Tree ring dating may be a much more difficult task in the humid east, where almost no wood survives this long.
3/27 The 100 miles from Moundville to Oak Mountain State Park, near Birmingham, Alabama, was made interesting by the gradual transition from the Mississippi Valley into the southern extreme of the Appalachian Mountains. Outcroppings of limestone began to appear along the highway while the broad flat valleys began to narrow and steepen.
Spring had started to outrun us, but the slight elevation gain allowed us to catch up. The dogwood and redbud around us in the state park are again at peak bloom, and many of the trees have that delicate pale green of new leaves just opening. The campground is pleasant - stretched out along both sides of a small valley at the foot of Oak Mountain, with the individual sites nicely spaced in open deciduous forest. The state park contains 10,000 acres, extending up and over the top of the mountain, and is laced with inviting hiking trails (which we didn't get a chance to try - we gotta hurry north, to keep up with Spring).
Birmingham didn't really get started as a city until 1871 (rather late as eastern cities go), when the north-south and east-west railroads met at this point and a land company, backed by the railroad, organized and promoted a city. A barge canal extends from Port Birmingham, a few miles west of town, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico at Mobile. This transportation, together with extensive nearby deposits of iron ore, coal, dolomite, and limestone allowed Birmingham, like the English city for which it was named, to become a major center for iron and steel manufacturing. It is now the largest city in Alabama (871,000 for the MSA).
While we were in Mobile, the newspapers were reporting an acrimonious debate about the future of the barge canal - which requires expensive maintenance on an ongoing basis, and now has very little commercial traffic. This canal extends nearly 400 miles from Mobile to Birmingham, a bit longer than the Erie Canal (from Buffalo to Albany, NY) - although not nearly as prominent and important in the history of the country.
The Birmingham Museum of Art has grown incrementally over many years in a crowded downtown site, apparently patched together from pieces of several buildings. But the most recent renovation has tied it all gracefully together into a coherent and attractive whole. It's large and pleasant, and several portions of the collections are quite fine. The 19th C. American collection features a large and excellent Bierstadt (Looking Down on Yosemite Valley, CA, 1865), flanked by excellent landscapes by artists from the same period with whom we were less familiar (Sontag, Hertzog). Another gallery was dominated by a huge Bouguereau angel. The descriptive material in all the galleries was more extensive than found in most other museums, and was informative and well-written.
Their huge collection of Wedgwood pottery was enhanced by a lot of text explaining the cultural context. Wedgwood must have been one of the earliest assembly lines because in 1769 "The workmen were trained towards their particular skill and not allowed to wander from place to place within the factory." "constant hours, a time clock"...The logistics of pottery distribution (pottery is heavy and easily broken) caused Wedgwood to be instrumental in the establishment of the earliest turnpikes and canals. A marketing genius, Wedgwood elaborated on the exclusivity of royal sponsorship and established some of the first large self-service showrooms, published cheap catalogs with money-back guarantees and free delivery, did detailed market research, all during the period of time when London grew from 200,000 to 900,000 people and one sixth of Englanders lived in London. The beautiful Frieze Room in Adamesque-style was constructed to incorporate a rare set of 51 Wedgwood blue and white jasperware tablets in the Dancing Hours pattern.
A special exhibit of vignette paintings by Dori & Joseph DeCamillis, a joint effort, just like this trip report because you cannot tell which person did which part. (And the DeCamilis are also nomads, traveling around the country in a van, selling their works at fairs and festivals.) Their many 7"x 5" works portray the interiors of American houses in loving detail. It was fun to note that two of the works on display were lent by Susan and Leonard Nemoy.
The Birmingham Botanical Gardens had little color in their formal gardens, as it is too early for roses, iris, and lilies. But the wild areas were abloom with azaleas and the smaller spring flowers. The Japanese Gardens had a great red Torii gate and the teahouse was charming. The pools reflected red bridges and interesting stones, but the use of seven different styles left an unsatisfying impression.
3/29 Continuing up Interstate 65, our next stop was Huntsville, Alabama, only 72 miles away: The major attraction here is the U.S. Space and Rocket Center. We found a campsite available at the small campground on the grounds of the Center, an easy walk from the Museum. We had expected to spend the afternoon looking at the museum, and then move on the next morning. But after looking at the museum literature, we decided to stay an extra night and do it right.
The museum contains a very large collection of space and rocket hardware, and also a specialized "amusement park" of space shuttle simulators and other activities intended to entertain, teach, and simulate various aspects of space travel. We also enjoyed an extensive interpretive exhibit of meteorites.
The Gemini capsule was there, along with an enormous blow-up photo of John Glenn from his first flight. No mention was made of his more recent flight. We saw the burial site of one of the two earliest monkeys in space -- she died of old age and is interred near the tour bus terminal.
Much is made of Werner von Braun at the Space Center and in Huntsville, where nearly every new public building seems to be named for him. I cannot remember public opinion in those first years after WWII when von Braun and his team of German rocket scientists were brought to work in the USA, but I wonder how the government managed to bring it off, given the animosity toward them during the war years.
The admission also includes an IMAX film (a choice from among three films), and a 90-minute bus tour of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. We especially enjoyed a walk along a high catwalk through the huge building where Boeing is assembling sections of the International Space Station. Some pieces are already in orbit, and several others are ready to go, but delayed by the Russians, who were supposed to have launched a key piece over a year ago, but are still dragging their feet. Activity here seemed to be scaled way back during the delay, with only a few workers on the assembly floor.
Scale models and computer simulations of the Space Station were on display in the museum, and help to convey the immense size of this project. The main support boom is almost 400 feet long. This boom ties together a large and varied collection of gigantic solar panels, laboratories, separate living quarters for French, American, and Russian scientists and astronauts, assorted chunks of scientific apparatus, maneuvering and station-keeping engines, communications antennas, etc.
Forming a backdrop for the whole museum complex is a full-scale mockup of the space shuttle with its huge external fuel tank and booster rockets. Although this particular shuttle never flew, most of the pieces, including the shuttle itself, are real - assembled from early production units that were used for various kinds of training or ground testing. On the other side of the building, a Saturn moon rocket stands, towering into the sky. Yet another Saturn is mounted horizontally, separated into sections as if for transport to the launch assembly site. Being able to walk around up close and touch these sections really helps us understand the immense scale.
3/30 Helen toured the local Art Museum and Botanic Garden, finding them both pleasant.
3/31 Chattanooga is a challenge. The first challenge was to spell the name. The second challenge was to get from one place to another in the city. The roads never go where you want to go. The Interstate highway had jams because of lane closures for construction or repairs. The city is divided by a huge meander of the Tennessee River and by several high steep ridges, so getting from anywhere to almost anywhere else requires circuitous routes.
The city began with a trading post on the river in 1815 and continued to thrive because of its location on trade routes - initially the river and later the railroads. It has evolved into a diversified manufacturing economy. The Tennessee Valley Authority has a major headquarters here, also contributing to the economy. The 1995 population of the MSA is about 430,000. Several major Civil War battles took place here, because of the key location on supply lines for both North and South. Our campground is on a battlefield, and nearby Lookout Mountain, which defines the south edge of the city, was the site of another major battle.
The top of Lookout Mountain is now a National Military Park. The mountain top boasts sheer sandstone cliffs with impressive views across the river valley, interesting rock formations which have been planted with impressive gardens, and a cave with a 144-foot waterfall inside the cave. This has made tourism a major contributor to the local economy. We spent half a day playing tourist on Lookout Mountain and another few hours in the Hunter Museum of American Art. We were pleased to find artists from our home down prominently featured: A big Paley wrought iron fence and gate is a prominent feature of the exterior architecture, and several Wendell Castle pieces were in the contemporary furniture collection.
We had planned to wander around the waterfront and the city center, but an all-day rain dampened our enthusiasm.
4/3 Still raining this morning! A 2.5" deep aluminum tray that we set outside in the evening was full to overflowing in the morning. The campground has water standing everywhere, and I had to get out my boots to hook up the trailer and break camp. Fortunately, we both have full suits of high quality Gore-Tex raingear - used mostly on our wilderness expeditions, but handy for days like this.
We started driving, generally toward Memphis, but picking narrow state highways, south of Nashville, north of Huntsville. Somewhere south of Nashville, we picked up the Natchez Trace Parkway, and followed it southwest for 50 miles or so. This is a lovely drive. The road is good - two lanes, with wide, neatly manicured grass strips on both sides. The Parkway is built through woodlands, avoiding the towns, and crossing local roads on overpasses, so that there are essentially no intersections or traffic lights, and no buildings visible, except an occasional farmhouse in the distance. Two years ago, we drove another section of the Parkway, near its southern terminus at Natchez. Perhaps someday we'll drive the full length.
But this time, Helen noticed a cluster of campgrounds on the map in the vicinity of Pickwick Dam on the Tennessee River, some on the large lake above the dam and some on the river below the dam. So we left the Parkway and headed northwest. After checking two other campgrounds, we ended up at the TVA campground, on the river just below the dam. This is our first contact with the Tennessee Valley Authority, although we read a lot about it as children in school. TVA is a 1930's creation - sort of like the WPA and the Army Corps of Engineers wrapped up together - which built a series of power and flood control dams in the Tennessee Valley and brought power, telephones, and other major changes to the entire population of this large region. It's one of the world's fairly major social engineering experiments, and seems to have been a continuing success.
As a Federal agency, they accept The Golden Age card. So we paid $7.50/night for a large campsite with water and 50-amp electricity and a great view of the river, the dam, and the locks. We watched a tug push two huge barges out of the lock while we set up camp.
This past week has felt sort of like "It's Tuesday, so we must be in Paris". This old travel joke really isn't apt, since not only were we not sure what state and what time zone we were in, we often didn't know the day of the week either. Recently, we've hopped back and forth between Eastern and Central time, and also back and forth across state lines - from Alabama through a corner of Georgia into Tennessee, then back to Alabama, then across a corner of Mississippi and back into Tennessee. While seeing the sights of Chattanooga, Tennessee, we were surprised to find that our campground was in Georgia.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, we were supposed to have changed to Daylight Savings Time. There may have been a day or two when our own clocks were two hours different than the local time. (Or maybe Daylight Savings Time canceled out one of the time zone changes and we only thought we were two hours off, or …).
The rain was almost continuous, all day. The roadside ditches were full. The streams we crossed were all overflowing their banks. The Tennessee River, in front of our campsite, is a couple of feet above its normal level. The dam is spilling massive amounts of water through open spillways, and presumably running the maximum through its turbine generators as well. This ought to mark a formal end to the year-long drought, at least for the Tennessee Valley. We haven't heard how far east and south this weather pattern extends - perhaps Georgia and Florida will get some benefit too. (The next day, we heard from the lock keeper that from Friday to Monday, 5 inches of rain fell over the entire Tennessee Valley, insuring that the river will continue to rise for several days.)
The power plant has an unattended visitor's area, which includes a catwalk above the row of large generators and a view through large plate glass windows into the control room.
4/4 The monsoon may be over. We woke to a brilliantly clear morning. The stationary cold front is moving again, and has headed off somewhere to the east, leaving us with dry northern air, and a 42-degree morning temperature.
We have a panoramic view of the river from our campsite. The river is covered with chaotic breaking waves, whitewater gleaming in the sun wherever we look. There's no evidence of the rocks and shoals of natural rapids here. Rather, the waves seem entirely due to the high volume and speed of water flow and the violence of the flow over the spillways on the dam, 500 yards or so upstream.
This is a strange river, which originates in the extreme eastern edge of Tennessee, flows southwest for hundreds of miles, cuts down through a corner of Alabama and Mississippi, then turns abruptly north and flows another 200 miles almost due north before emptying into the Ohio River, about 50 miles above where the Ohio drains into the Mississippi near Cairo, Illinois. The geologists are still arguing about how and why this unusual path evolved.
A mile or so south of the campground, across the river, we can see the smokestacks and the top of a high building - a paper mill, belching a high volume of smoke and steam, and sporadically emitting a loud roar (of escaping steam?) An occasional acrid odor is noticeable, although we're not directly downwind from it.
Shortly after we started driving this morning, we saw the entrance to the TVA Visitor's Center, at the Pickwick Dam lock, and pulled in to check it out. The history of the TVA and an overview of the entire network of TVA dams and locks was well described. While we were there, a tug showed up, pushing a collection of lashed-together barges that barely fit into the 1000-foot-long by 100-foot-wide lock. The tug had to unhook from its load and squeeze in at an angle in order to get the lock doors closed. It appeared that there was about a foot to spare on each side of the barges. I can barely imagine the skill and experience necessary to manage that ungainly load, particularly with a strong river current and a strong crosswind.
Our 3-hour drive to Memphis was along 2-lane state highways, mostly SR 57. It's good road, although with a narrow shoulder. The country is sparsely populated, with only a few small towns along the way. Much of the land is tree farms, or recently clear-cut forest, looking ragged and desolate and on its way to becoming a tree farm.
In mid-afternoon, we settled into Tom Sawyer's RV Park - on the west bank of the Mississippi near West Memphis, Arkansas.
Crossing the river into Arkansas is a significant milepost for us: this was the only state of the contiguous 48 which we hadn't visited (although not all States were with the RV). We'll pick up Alaska and Yukon Territory this summer. Perhaps we can find time for a detour to Northwest Territories. If so, this would complete the continental States, Provinces, and Territories. Hawaii will have to wait.
From our campsite, we have a nice view of the river, across several acres of flat flood plain which is grassy and neatly mowed. The park description says "open all year, river permitting". We spoke to an employee who said that the flood plain is covered with water every year, and that the water comes all the way up through the RV sites in many years. We noted that the bathroom building is on skids, so that it can easily be towed to higher ground.
The park has placed comfortable park benches along the river bank, currently about 15 feet above water level. I sat there for a long time with binoculars, watching the huge barges being pushed very slowly upstream against the strong current. Turning these 800-foot-long behemoths around the sharp bend just north of us appeared to be a major undertaking. We occasionally heard the throb of the huge tug diesels during the night, but many of the boats seem to tie up at dusk. Several barges have pulled in close to the bank north of us and appear to be stopping for the night. Apparently, river navigation is so difficult that some of the commercial traffic travels only in daylight? Or do they have rules about the number of hours they can drive, like the long-haul truckers?
The boats that do continue all night are using unbelievably bright spotlights. These lights illuminate the riverbank like daylight from a mile away, as we discovered when tugs rounded the bend of the river either up- or down-river from us. At some point during the turn, the light would be pointed directly at us, and we had to shield our eyes. The lights are on swivel mounts, manually pointed from inside the pilothouse, and we often saw the light being swept along both shores as the pilots searched for buoys and other landmarks. There are channel buoys, at least along this stretch of river, but they are small and unlighted.
Many killdeer are running and flying noisily over the meadow between us and the river, and we discovered that the park management has marked the location of several egg-filled killdeer nests with little white flags so they won't get accidentally damaged. "Nest" only designates a place, not a thing. As far as I could see, the eggs are simply laid directly on the ground in a little depression. These are extremely noisy birds, so it was amusing to find that the Latin name is charadrius vociferus. A little further down the river bank, where the meadow is unmowed, several meadowlark are perched precariously on the tips of last year's tall weed stems, showing off their brilliant yellow breasts and singing loudly.
4/6 Graceland Mansion, Elvis Presley's home, is surprisingly modest - only a dozen or so rooms (but lots of pianos). Some of the outbuildings contained memorabilia, including gorgeous costumes and hundreds of gold and platinum records. Helen enjoyed the simple tour, skipping the private airplane and automobile collections.
4/7 The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art is a strange building. On one side is a small but attractive 1916 neo-classical white marble building, with lots of carved marble decorations, inside and out. This building houses the oldest portion of the art collection - fragments of Roman statuary and mosaics and early European religious paintings. The faint sounds of a choir of monks doing Gregorian Chant led us into a reproduction of a small chapel which held early Christian paintings and icons. The choir was a recording, but it effectively established the appropriate mood as we walked toward the exhibit.
Tacked on to this building, and partly obscuring it, is a much larger undistinguished modern building - a hodgepodge of architectural elements which keeps the rain off the art, but has little other redeeming value. The art collection was eclectic. Helen and Dave both found interesting things to look at.
4/9 The Memphis Botanical Garden provided us with a pleasant walk through attractive plantings, but had little that is memorable. Across the road, the permanent collections at Dixon Gallery and Gardens had been completely removed for a flower show. Their woodland garden is very well done. The gallery is a remodeled old mansion, and the extensive landscaping around the house is exactly to our taste - we'll take it.
One evening, on the recommendation of several Internet friends, we tried Memphis dry barbecue at Corky's barbecue joint. We're not generally barbecue fans, but enjoyed this a lot. "Dry barbecue" was a whole new idea to us - a unique regional "cuisine". Apparently, the meat is not basted during the latter part of the cooking process, so that the surface is indeed "dry", and then is sprinkled with a dry spice mixture before serving. Good stuff!
4/10 We drove the 200 miles to Hot Springs, Arkansas on Interstate 40, except for the last 30 miles which was along US 70. The early portion of the drive was through typical flat Mississippi Valley farmland. Later, as we climbed out of the valley, the land became gently rolling, gradually crinkling up into wooded Ozark foothills. We're camped at Young's Lakeshore RV Resort, on an arm of a long narrow reservoir and a couple of miles from downtown Hot Springs. It's a pleasant, low-key place, and very modem friendly (a phone outlet on a small table in a covered porch, available 24 hours a day.)
Hot Springs is a fairly small town, originally built as a tourist attraction around the eponymous springs. The National Park began in 1832 as a Federal Reserve to protect the springs, which bubble out along the side of a steep ridge, originally flowing down the hill to form a warm stream through the valley. As the popularity grew, and a new railroad provided convenient access, the tourist accommodations gradually expanded into a row of luxurious "baths" - large, ornate buildings containing many private bathtubs filled from the hot springs, plus the other accoutrements of a health resort - gymnasiums, massage rooms, steam baths, etc.
Originally, the hillside was a barren expanse of tufa - mineral rock precipitated out of the hot water. Over the years, the springs were all covered and the water brought down the hill through pipes. This allowed the hillside to become covered with vegetation, so it appears very different today than it did 150 years ago. The outflow stream fed by the springs is now a tunnel under the row of bathhouses.
The water from these springs has no sulfur - in fact no smell at all. The taste is a mild neutral mineral flavor - calcium, potassium, a little sodium, slightly effervescent with dissolved carbon dioxide. Along a city street, people in cars still pull up to public fountains fed from the springs, filling large water jugs to take home. A couple of natural-looking free-flowing springs have been left open as tourist attractions.
All but one of the bathhouses have closed permanently. One of the old bathhouses is still privately operated and still offers the traditional services. In addition, the spring water is piped to some of the downtown hotels a few blocks away, where baths are offered. The most elaborate bathhouse has been restored and is operated as a museum, with the lobby housing the National Park Visitor Center. It is an expensively ornate building dating from about 1920. The steam cabinets and elaborately equipped massage rooms seemed vaguely familiar to me, probably because similar facilities were frequently used as backdrops for scenes in old novels and movies, including a memorable Saratoga Springs scene in a James Bond thriller.
The land around Hot Springs was folded and pushed up into high mountains about 3 million years ago, and then eroded down the present rounded 1000-foot high ridges, which run generally east-west. Quite a few of the small rivers in the valleys between these ridges have been dammed by the Corps of Engineers, for flood control and power generation. We took a long drive through this country, to the east and south of Hot Springs, and stopped at a small visitor's center at one of the dams - at De Gray Lake on SR 7. This is a relatively modern dam, with sophisticated water management equipment which can control the temperature as well as the flow rate of the outflow into the stream below. There also is a holding pond below the dam, and a reversible turbine which can pump water from the pond back up into the reservoir above the dam. The same water can be used over and over - flowing down to generate power on hot days with high power demand, and then being pumped back upstream using excess power - perhaps at night when there is low power demand and other generating plants have excess capacity.
Water level in the reservoir is managed to optimize a complex and conflicting set of needs: recreational use of the large reservoir, wildlife sustenance around the reservoir, fish culture in the stream below, flood control and maintenance of water levels in down stream shipping canals. During periods of low water levels, grain is planted on the exposed "beaches", providing food for birds, and (as water levels rise) food and shelter for young fish.)
4/14 The drive along SR 7 from Hot Springs north to Harrison, Arkansas ranks as one of the more scenic that we've done in the East, and should be a "must-do" for anyone traveling through this region. It's somewhat similar to the Blue Ridge Parkway, in that the highway often goes continuously for many miles along the top of a steep-sided ridge, providing long views of mountains on both sides. The portion through the Ozark National Forest, from Interstate 40 north to Jasper, is the most spectacular. We often could see several successive mountain ridges on both sides of us, progressively fading into the hazy background in the far distance.
The elevation changes are not great - perhaps 1500 feet maximum - but the steep slopes, occasional sheer cliffs, and sinuous river valleys provide a rugged beauty which makes up for the relatively modest scale. On the ridge tops, the trees are just leafing out, in subtle shades of pale green and grey, with occasional pink tints. The dogwood are not quite fully open, still with a bit of yellow in flowers that will bleach to a brilliant white during the next week or two. There are several prolific kinds of roadside flowers, but all seem to be shades of blue or purple.
It's slow, twisty, driving for most of the way, but the highway is good quality, we encountered little traffic, and (with one exception) there are no particular problems for big rigs. The exception is the 3-mile-long 7% grade just south of Jasper. Coming from the south, as we did, this descent to the confluence of the Buffalo and Little Buffalo River is a real test of braking ability for a big rig. Going in the other way, it would be a test of the radiator capacity.
As we left the National Forest and approached Harrison, the hills became dotted with summer cottages and resort properties, becoming fairly dense near the city. At Harrison, we turned west to Eureka Springs, which is an even more blatantly touristy town. The highway was lined almost continuously with expensive resorts, restaurants, entertainment complexes, and tourist shopping emporiums.
Finding a place to camp on Beaver Lake, 10 miles west of Eureka Springs, was a frustrating experience. We were using the AAA Tourbook campground information, via our Map'n'Go computer mapping program. We first checked out a Corps of Engineers (COE) campground shown on the map as located below the dam on the north shore. There's nothing there but a day-use-only picnic area. Then we drove around the lake to a COE campground on the south shore of the lake, accessed by several miles of narrow twisty road. It was closed - the AAA information was wrong, and this campground doesn't open until May 1. The campground attendant had already arrived for the summer and was camped near the entrance, so we knocked on his door and asked for advice. He grumbled about state bureaucrats, and said that this campground remained nearly empty all last summer because of incorrect information provided to the telephone reservations service. He then directed us back to the dam. It turns out that there really is a campground there, but on the south shore, not where Map'n'Go shows it. It's a very nice place, on a little island connected to shore by an artificial causeway. Nearly every campsite has a view out over the water in several directions.
Eureka Springs is a small version of Hot Springs - built to provide services for those who came to bathe in the supposedly therapeutic springs. The town is picturesque because of its location - built on the sides of two small but steep little valleys. Most of the streets are crooked and narrow. The town seems to be prosperous, fed by an influx of tourists to the many resorts and lakes in the area. Eureka Gardens, just outside of town, is a fairly large private garden built on the around a natural spring and its outflow stream. We enjoyed walking through naturalized plantings of wildflowers and flowering shrubs on the hillsides. Dinner at a German/Czech restaurant in town was a mixed experience: Dave ordered a Czech-style goulash and enjoyed it. Helen ordered sauerbraten and fount it disappointing - the Czech version being very bland compared to the familiar German version.
4/17 Tomorrow, we'll begin our zig-zag tour of Missouri - first heading northeast to St. Louis, on the Mississippi River (the Missouri-Illinois boundary), then straight west to the Kansas City, on the Missouri River at the Missouri/Kansas border. After that, we'll briefly detour to Oz for a get-together of RV Club friends (near Junction City Kansas) and then head straight north toward Winnipeg, Manitoba, the next major milepost on our route to Alaska. Homer, Alaska, is only 4700 miles away from Eureka Springs!