Michael and Cathy's New-Fangled Travel Blog: Arkansas Ozarks Vacation -- Day 8

The main lobby in the Mather Lodge in Petit Jean State Park, near Dardenelle, Arkansas.

The most spectacular vistas of our trip were at Stout's Point in Petit Jean State Park. First here's a close-up of Petit Jean's gravesite, surrounded by wrought iron fencing...

...but here you can see that the grave is actually on the precipice of Stout's Point.

From Stout's Point there are fantastic vistas of the Arkansas River valley.

Here I am at Stout's Point, the camera is looking more or less due east...

...but looking just a bit farther south, the view looks like this:

My favorite shot. Stout's Point boulders in the foreground, with a winding road and the yellow wildflowers in the valley meadows below.

Just to prove that they actually encourage people to go out on the boulders to get a better (but much more dangerous) view of the valley, here you can see a clearly intentional opening in the railing, with steps leading down and out to the boulders!

From Petit Jean State Park we took Arkansas State Route 7 south about 2 hours until we reached Hot Springs, which unfortunately boasts...

We had lunch at McClard's Bar-B-Q, an old-fashioned, Mom-and-Pop, hole-in-the-wall joint. It's said to be Bill Clinton's favorite Bar-B-Q restaurant, and they claim he still comes by to eat here whenever he comes to town. There are plenty of Clinton photos all over the wall, including one of what one would suspect to be 3rd-generation McClard's with him in the Oval Office.

Then it's on to Hot Springs National Park. It's a strange sort of National Park, with historic Bathhouse Row on the east side of Central Avenue (and technically in the park) but with shops, art galleries, restaurants, and the like on the west side of the street. Here is a snapshot of one of three public fountains that dispense the mineral water. Seems somehow weird to watch people pull up to the curb, haul out three or four jugs, fill them up with water, and drive off. Is the water truly hot? You bet it is!

There are eight historic Bath Houses along Bathhouse Row. They were built between about 1890 and 1910. They are close to the sidewalk, and a strip of fairly tall trees stands between the sidewalk and busy Central Avenue. As a result, even though the Houses sit fairly close to each other, it is impossible to get a photo that gives an accurate sense of the breadth of the Row. Each House is architecturally unique from the others. Only two of them are still in operation, the Buckstaff and the Quapaw (both of which are operated by a permit from the National Park Service), a third (the Fordyce) is the National Bath House Museum (some photos from that a bit later), and thus the other five are empty, many of them closing as recently as the 1980's. They exude a beautiful yet eerie quality, even in broad daylight. Here is a shot of the Ozark Bath House, with its red Spanish tile roof, twin towers, small white awnings, and carved flowerboxes. It's empty.

Here is a corner view of the Quapaw Bath House. It is the largest on the Row, and the one in which we will have our bath and massage tomorrow afternoon.

The Quapaw is highlighted by its large gold dome with blue tile insets, fish-in-sea-shell motif, and a large twin collonaded verandas on either side of the tri-awning entrance.

Hot Springs has a very checkered past. It was a hotbed (pardon the pun) of ganster activity, and illegal casinos (up to 130 of them!) operated well into the 1960's. Here's a shot of Maxine's, on Central Avenue, a notorious brothel in the 1950's and 60's; it's now a bar bearing her name.

The Arlington Hotel. Strategically located an the north end of Bathhouse Row on a curve on Central Avenue, Al Capone maintained a suite (room 443) year-round here, and when he came to town he would rent out the entire 4th floor. He could look out his front window and see who was coming and going into his various speakeaies and casinos, most notably the Southern Club just one block away, which today is Madame Trussard's Wax Museum.

We toured the Bathhouse Musem in the Fordyce, which attempts to maintain the Baths as they were in their heydey about a century ago. Here is a shot of one of the private shower stalls. This is the height of plumbing technology in 1905.

Steam cabinets. Or torture devices. We weren't sure.

The things with hoses were called needle sprayers. And recall the water was HOT .... Yikes!

In the ladies' side of the Bath House, in the massage area, there was this heat lamp apparatus, a precursor to today's tanning beds - if it didn't electrocute you, I guess.

There were rows and rows of these tiny changing stalls in the Women's Dressing Room. The Bathhouses were very popular among both the rich and the common folk way back then, and were nearly always full.