This is part 2 of our Arkansas Post-Covid Vaccination Trip. Go here for part 1, Two Nights in Little Rock.
It’s just about 1 hour drive from Little Rock to Hot Springs, so we did that rather easily. We couldn’t check into our Airbnb until after 3 pm, so we figured we would hit up the National Park first and see what there was to do and get the lay of the land.
Hot Springs National Park is unusual in that it is in the middle of the town of Hot Springs. Hot Springs is an interesting place, for sure, but it also is one of those places that you know has seen better days.
In a nutshell, there are a variety of bathhouses that are from the early 1900’s that have been preserved. The bathhouses were built to use the hot water from the hot springs in order to (the idea goes) improve people’s health. People came from far and wide to take baths and steam in the hot water fresh from the springs in Hot Springs. As time went on, this sort of thing fell out of fashion, and eventually the Park Service decided to preserve the houses for future generations. Only one bathhouse has been functioning the entire time and you can take baths there just like people did back in the day. Other houses have different purposes: a museum, a modern day spa, a store, a brewery, a small hotel, and more. They are all on one side of the street, called Bathhouse Row. On the other side of the street, there are all manner of tourist shops and restaurants, none of which are particularly good (yes, I’m a restaurant snob, but I also don’t need to buy any rocks on my vacation!) and the whole places feels a bit sad. Oh, and there are 4 lanes of traffic whizzing by with limited places to cross.
The National park is great! The surrounding infrastructure needs help. In addition to the bathhouses there is a hill with a grand promenade you can walk on, a variety of scenic drives through the surrounding mountains and quite a few hiking trails. The Park Service also did a great job with a bathhouse museum.
Things that could be improved: more crosswalks, perhaps less lanes to cross—why not make it a two lane road, widen sidewalks on both sides, more crosswalks (did I mention more crosswalks?) That would make it easier to go back and forth and ideally attract slightly more people to improve the eating establishments? Then, the brewery wasn’t open at all one of the days we were there: if you want this to be a tourist destination, day of the week must be irrelevant! And the bathhouse that functions like the old-timey bathhouses, Buckstaff Baths, are nearly impossible to reach via the phone. They need to work on that and answer the phones! Anyway, those are my actual suggestions…I also had other ideas like, add a herd of buffalo…I suppose part of the real problem is that visiting ARKANSAS just isn’t as exciting as visiting Colorado, Yellowstone, or France, and we now have easy access to hot tubs all over the country. But you know what, as you’ll see reading this and my other posts, it was a wonderful place to spend a week of vacation!
Anyway, back to the recap! We found parking easily and headed to Bathhouse Row. We arrived on Memorial Day, and it seemed pretty busy. The sun was shining and it was warm but not too hot. Perfect weather!
A view of bathhouse row. The buildings are each amazing in their own ways, beautiful architecture in a variety of styles.
The Fordyce Bathhouse was our first stop, as there was all manner of terrific information and brochures outside, and a wonderful museum about the history of the bathhouses inside.
I love when Parks do this: just give you ideas of what to do. I usually plan our activities in advance, but sometimes on a longer trip it is impossible to get it all ready and it’s so cool to be able to show up to a visitor’s center and say, okay, here are the cool things to do!
I should digress and say that I had been to Hot Springs before, as part of a road trip in 1989 with my family. I kept a diary of the trip, and gave four pages to Hot Springs. During that visit it seemed we camped at the Gulpha Gorge Campground and went to the museum as well. You can attempt to decipher my handwriting if you want: I did a great job describing the steps of the bath and also documented everything I ate. It starts on June 25.
We went into the museum, which was one way due to COVID. Masks were ambiguously required, so we wore them. It was neat to see all the steps of the baths, especially because…one of the activities we did have planned was a “traditional bathing package” at Buckstaff Baths the next morning.
The men’s floor had some elaborate sculptures and decor!
Where the water came in originally…supposedly…
After the museum, we walked around a bit, just to get a feel of things.
There are really quite a few trails. We followed some short ones, and then decided to do one of the scenic drives, the one around Hot Springs Mountain.
There were a few nice views, and at one point we decided to park and go off on foot on the Hot Springs Mountain Trail. It wasn’t terribly scenic (too many trees!) but it was very nice to walk around on. And it was very pretty!
There is a lookout tower on top of the mountain that you can go up for a price. We decided not to, but I’m sure the view is even nicer up there.
When you get to the end of the scenic drive, you go right by a spring that you can drink from. We filled up some water bottles, and yes, the water WAS very nice! Some of it is hot, some of it isn’t, and it all seemed to taste very clean.
We checked into our Airbnb next. The description said you could walk to the bathhouses, but a few commenters thought that wasn’t the best idea. I had thought we would, but we decided against it…it was a long walk through a less exciting neighborhood. However, it was a perfectly lovely place to stay and was a very short drive from the action.
We decided to have dinner at the brewery since it wasn’t open the next day. We had eaten a very early lunch so we were hungry earlier, and off we went.
The Superior Brewery is in an old bathhouse, which means there are old tile floors everywhere. It was pretty cool, even though we were sort of put in a less exciting room that we’d hoped for. We split a beer sampler and each got a sandwich. It was a fun time!
As we are old people, we went home after dinner and a short walk, and ended up watching TV.
The next morning we woke up to get ready for our baths at Buckstaff Baths. We ended up being ready to go early, so we drove up the other mountain, West Mountain, first, and just stopped at a few viewpoints. It was a rainy/foggy morning.
It was easy to find parking in town at a huge garage which was free and conveniently located. We were still early, so we walked around a bit more and looked at the various nooks and crannies of Bathhouse Row.
Our appointment for Buckstaff Baths was at 10:30 am, and they meant it, not a minute early. So we waited a few minutes, and then everybody who had the 10:30 am time waited in line to get our hands sanitized and fill out forms. Like, literally, they kept wiping down the table in between parties…I totally get businesses are having COVID protocols, but this would all be done if we all just got vaccinated, or if businesses could say, okay, just show your vaccine card and then we don’t have to pretend that taking your temperature and using hand sanitizer will stop the spread of COVID, when the thing that really stops it is the vaccine some of us have gotten…but I digress.
There are separate men’s and women’s floors, so Louie and I said adieu to each other and went our separate ways. (Pandemic living: it is still often weird not seeing him for a few hours). They take you up an elevator to a row of dressing rooms that look like they are from 1912, which they ARE. Buckstaff Baths has been in continuous operation as a bathhouse since then, with limited remodeling, though it was very clean and well taken care of. You get undressed and put your things in a locker and then the attendant wraps you in a sheet, toga style. You go into the next room and get into a bath (this was all described in my journal entries from 1989), and the water is pretty hot. Your attendant helps you get into the bath (be prepared to be undressed in front of her) and then you relax for 20 minutes. They may bring you hot spring water to drink, and you have a loofah to scrub with if you like.
Next you get out and go to an area with places to lie down, and they put hot towels under you and over you, and you lie there and continue relaxing. They will put a cool towel over your face. Next was the steam cabinet, where you sit in literally a cabinet, but have your head out, and you steam. Then you sit in a sitz bath, which is a tiny bathtub you yes, sit in. For me, all of the things in this paragraph I did wearing a sheet, though not always the same one, but Louie said in the men’s baths they were mostly totally naked for these parts. I suppose they think women are more modest. Lastly is the needle shower, a shower with dozens or perhaps hundreds of little needles of water coming at you from all directions.
After that they might take you to a cooling room, but I went straight into my 20 minute massage, which was part of the “traditional bathing package”. Louie ended up waiting in the cooling room for nearly 30 minutes, so I finished first and waited for him outside.
For obvious reasons I didn’t take any photos in the bathhouse, but it was lots of tile and marble and old timey looking stuff. I loved it and would highly recommend! It is really difficult to get in touch with them though, so plan ahead and keep calling. I think I booked about 6 to 8 weeks in advance, but I don’t know if that is necessary.
After our baths we were quite hungry, but wanted to get out of the downtown area for a bit, so we headed out to a restaurant that was near Lake Hamilton. That restaurant ended up being closed, but we found a nearby Mexican place called Jose’s and had a lovely lunch. We decided to visit Garvin Woodland Gardens next which was about 15 minutes away from the restaurant.
The gardens were really beautiful! They were lush and green and full of plants, well thought out, and wonderful to walk through.
There were various paths and bridges to take. We saw a lovely pond with koi which were fun to watch.
You can see it was rainy looking…we had umbrellas with us, but hoped it would hold off.
The gardens were right next to Lake Hamilton and had a few miles of trails that went further from the visitor’s center.
There was an area called the Children’s Gardens with a cave and a huge wooden structure called the Tree House and other neat stuff. We enjoyed it! This picture is taken from inside the cave.
The Treehouse from outside and from inside.
We decided to extend our walk onto a little connected almost island area which was called the Hixson Nature Preserve. It started raining after we walked for a bit though, but we were glad to have our umbrellas.
Until it started pouring, and then we were glad to be wearing shorts, and finally it was thundering and we were just walking as fast as we could to get back to the regular part of the gardens and ideally some sort of shelter.
Just as we were getting back to the Treehouse area we came across a garden employee driving a golf cart, who informed us that the gardens were closed due to the storm and we should head back to the visitor’s center to either wait it out, or we could ask for a refund. Well, DUH it was storming. What he did not do was offer us a ride back! So we got a little further and there was a pavilion of sorts so we stopped under it to take a little break from the rain, and then finally headed the rest of the way back. We didn’t ask for a refund because we had already seen all of the islands anyway, and so we just left.
The pavilion where we rested, which seems to host events and such. I believe it was called the Garvan Pavilion.
After the garden we both just wanted to be drier, so we headed back to our airbnb and cleaned up. We decided to relax a bit, and after awhile headed out for dinner.
We decided to have dinner at Rolando’s which served South American food. When we first got there it was a bit too crowded, so they told us to come back in 30 minutes. We went to walk around, but popped in at the Hot Springs Winery a few doors down and ended up doing a tasting and then purchasing a few bottles. The employee who helped us was super nice and friendly, and it was a nice thing to do while waiting for dinner.
Dinner was good. At this point it was pouring rain outside so we were just glad to be inside!
But also glad to eat some fish tacos, shrimp quesadillas and drink a couple of margaritas. After dinner we went home and watched TV: we watched Unorthodox on Netflix during this segment of the trip.
The next morning we woke up early due to a rooster crowing. He had been crowing the previous morning, but was extra excited this morning. I forgot to add that there was a stray cat around outside that had had food the first night but none the second night, and she was begging us for food for herself and her two kittens who were nearby. I can’t believe I didn’t a take a picture! Louie was heartbroken because we didn’t have any food, but I assume she will be okay: they all looked pretty well fed, not overly so, but good for feral cats. Hopefully whoever left the food will return, or she’ll make it on her own. (We were unclear by something our host had said, whether he was feeding them or if others were.) We checked out of our place then (which just meant we loaded up and left the key in the lockbox, love it) and had one more luxury planned.
Our airbnb in Hot Springs. It was the middle apartment of a triplex, and while it was nice, it was probably the least interesting place we stayed.
We went to Quapaw Bathhouse next, for the Quapaw package for couples. We had decided to splurge a bit on our vacation as we hadn’t done much of anything all year long. The Quapaw package had a couples bath, a massage, and a foot/scalp massage. We checked in and got changed into robes, and then were taken to our bath. This was a modern bath, a large jacuzzi tub, and we got to spend 20 minutes in it relaxing, then we were given cucumber water and sat around a bit. Next we went to another place to sit around, and finally were taken in for our massages. The massage and foot/scalp massage were one after the other and it was very nice and relaxing. The building was obviously modernized but the area with the baths still had many aspects from the past, but since I was in a robe and didn’t have my phone with me, I didn’t get any pictures either. We both really enjoyed our time at the Quapaw Bathhouse and Spa, but agreed if we had to pick one day, we would do the Buckstaff because it was more unique.
After that, we said goodbye to Hot Springs and headed north. Our next stop was a remote cabin in the Ozarks and was supposed to be about a 3 hour drive, so we planned to arrive by dinner. We had to get some groceries for the cabin, so we stopped at a Walmart about 30 minutes north and then after another hour or so ended up stopping at one more Mexican restaurant for lunch! We decided we had finally gotten caught up on eating at Mexican places after that: we both love Mexican food and hadn’t been to restaurants in so long it seemed like we were making up for lost time, but after the third one in a row we felt satiated, ha!
Let me know if you’ve been to Hot Springs and how your visit compared! Or if now you plan to go to check it out for yourself.
