I’d been feeling a bit overwhelmed by what would be my last trip post, if I kept the same pattern of two nights, and then I said to myself, this is MY blog, nobody except me and my mom reads it, so why not break the last post up?
So far I’ve told you about Little Rock, Hot Springs, and our wonderful cabin in the Ozarks near the town of Pettigrew. Our next airbnb was south of Fayetteville where we would be spending our final two nights of vacation, but I wanted to make a stop en route.
I like seeking out National Park Sites, not for a bucket list or anything, but because they are often well done and worth visiting, and I enjoy learning about history as we travel. I noticed that Fort Smith National Historic Site wasn’t too far out of the way, and I’d also found a blogger who really loved the town of Fort Smith, so we decided it was worth a short visit.
I wasn’t sure if our google directions already took the gravel roads into account when telling us how long it would take to get there, but it turned out they did. It took about 1 1/2 hours to get to Fort Smith, so we rolled in somewhere between 10 and 11. Fort Smith is located right on the western border of Arkansas by the Arkansas River, and our directions had us briefly in Oklahoma, which was very exciting.
The Visitor’s Center was closed due to COVID but there was a ranger sitting outside with a table of brochures and happy to answer any questions. I’m sorry we missed whatever museum would have been inside, but he said otherwise, just walk around and it is all well marked.
It seemed that the Fort was important in its history in regards to the Civil War and the Trail of Tears. Some of the information we read was a little confusing out of context, for instance we read something about the soldiers at the Fort abandoning the town when South Carolina seceding from the Union, but then later referring to the soldier being there fighting…so maybe that visitor’s center museum would have been helpful? Or a book I suppose.
In any case, it was a nice place to walk around. There was an extra long walk one could take down by the river, which added about 3/4 mile (I am just trying to remember this without research, so I could be wrong). We enjoyed a nice walk along the Arkansas River. We’d had dinner along the Arkansas River and crossed it a few times by foot in Little Rock and now we were seeing it again on the other side of the state.
After about an hour, we had seen all we could see. There weren’t proper restrooms at the site, so we figured we’d go and find lunch and bathrooms at the same place.
We drove down a very quaint, historic looking downtown strip to find a place called A.J.’s Oyster House. It was perfect: friendly, cool, had bathrooms, and we enjoyed some oysters too. I got the Oyster Po’boy and we split some Oysters Rockefeller.
After lunch we decided to pop back over to the downtown area to walk around, but I got distracted by a sign about Victorian Homes, and we ended up walking by some of them instead. They all seemed to be law firms now.
We couldn’t check into our airbnb until 3 pm and it was an hour away, so after our stroll we got coffees and relaxed at the Fort Smith Coffee Company (super cool place!) until it was a reasonable time to take off.
Keep your eyes out for the final, or who knows, installment of the trip to Arkansas!