We camped for two nights at Hot Springs National Park– what a beautiful setting with lots of big trees and a stream flowing by our campsite! It was such beautiful weather so we watched the royal wedding at our campsite.
We took a tour of one of the restored bath houses – the history was fascinating! What made it particularly special for me was that my parents went to Hot Springs in 1939 for their honey moon. The hotel where they stayed is still in operation and the bath house is now a restored museum.
Hot Springs is Molly’s favorite national park – it’s the only national park that that allows dogs on all of the trails so Molly got to hike with us. We were at the park on my 62nd birthday, the age you have to be to get a Golden Age Pass. It was a great birthday present - free admission to all national parks and forests and half off camping!
While we were in Hot Springs we heard on the news about a lady from Colorado who found a 9 carat diamond in a diamond mine in Arkansas. We had no idea that there was a diamond mine in North America. It is an Arkansas State Park called Crater of the Diamonds and it’s the only diamond mine in North America and the only mine in the world that is open to the public and you can keep any diamonds you find. I looked on the internet and found out that the mine was only 60 miles from Hot Springs so we decided to go try our luck at diamond mining! We watched a demonstration on how to sift for diamonds, rented some “sifters” and off we went to the diamond field to find a really big . On the way to the field we heard about a lady who had already found a ¾ carat diamond early in the morning so we had high expectations as we started to sift through our first bucket of dirt.
We spent 4 hours digging and hauling buckets of dirt and sifting through the mud searching for diamonds – we thought for sure we’d find a big diamond in one of our buckets of dirt but all we got was a bunch of mud all over our clothes and shoes! It just wasn’t our lucky day…
On our drive back home from Arkansas, we reflected on our 2 ½ month South West adventure. We drove over 10,000 miles and went to 28 national parks and 15 state parks- each park had it’s own unique beauty and history. We wouldn’t have wanted to miss seeing any of them !
We had a constantly changing landscape including four different deserts, deep canyons carved by rivers over millions of years, huge rock arches and lots of hoodoos and colorful rock layers. We traveled from the low est point in North America in Death Valley to 14,000 foot mountain peaks. We learned about the different native American tribes that lived in the west 10,000 years before the explorers and pioneers arrived and we learned about what life was like for the pioneers too. (I would have been a lousy pioneer- too hot and too dusty!)
Ahhhh…there’s no place like home! As much as we love to travel, it’s always great to get back home! We are looking forward to a fun and busy summer on the lake - spending time with friends and our adorable granddaughters Emmy and Lyla! Somehow we will need to squeeze in time to plan for our fall trip to the North East, too!
