It’s just that we’re on our way to Little Rock

Little Rock

Finally, a city with plenty of songs to choose from. I think the fact that you can easily rhyme the word “rock” has something to do with it. For some reason though, all of these songs about Little Rock are not terribly positive. Our man Hayes Carll here is singing about making his way down to Little Rock to see his baby, and he creepily implies that he’s not going to take no for an answer. Lee Ann Womack sings about escaping from someone as she drives her weird CGI Jeep out of Dallas and A Little Past Little Rock. Collin (née Bubba) Wray has a song about starting a new sober life in Little Rock selling VCRs at Walmart. Even Reba’s song titled Little Rock is sad even though it’s not actually about the city, but her wedding ring and loveless marriage. If all of these songs are to be believed, it seems Little Rock is not really a place you set out to visit, but rather a place you just end up at.

This is pretty much what happened to us. Little Rock wasn’t exactly on our list, but it was on our way as we continued to make it back to Omaha. We spent just two nights there, but managed to pack in plenty of adventure. Our initial plans were to just breeze through on a quick overnight stay, but at some point we realized the park we had booked was very unique, so we added a night so we could have a full day to explore.

We stayed at Downtown Riverside RV Park, which is located right on the Arkansas River. This was our first RV park inside a city and we were a little worried about navigating the surface streets with our rig. It wasn’t too bad though, and we made it to the park and backed our RV almost right up to the water.

That evening, we went for a sunset walk and checked out the nearby pedestrian bridge.

The next morning we set out on foot to explore Little Rock. We crossed the bridge and walked past the (closed for pandemic) Clinton Presidential Library.

Our first stop was a nature center run by the state Game & Fish Commission. They had lots of native animals (live and taxidermized) as well as some cool displays.

Then, it was time for some fancy donuts and coffee.

We took them to the riverside park to enjoy.

Izzy didn’t even finish her donut. She was too distracted by the amazing playground we were sitting next to. It didn’t have any traditional equipment, but was a series of concrete tubes, tunnels, ladders, and large rocks built into the hillside right next to the river. Izzy loved it. It was easy for her to escape and hide from us in these small spaces we didn’t want to venture into, which just added to her enjoyment. She had an amazing time running and climbing around.

Before too long it was time for lunch. We had to promise Izzy we’d come back to the park in order to get her to leave. We walked several blocks to a German beer hall with a nice beer garden.

After lunch, as promised we went back to the park. Once sufficiently worn down, we started the long walk back to the RV. On our way out we found a piece of the city’s namesake rock.

The next morning it was time to hit the road again. We left Little Rock headed for Branson, Missouri. Rural Arkansas was pretty, but some of the people living out there are so openly racist they advertise it on their billboards. Luckily, we didn’t need to stop anywhere near there and arrived without incident at Treasure Lake RV Resort.

We had decided to get back to Omaha quickly, so once again we had just a two night stay. While Charlotte was working, Izzy and I went out to run some errands and do a bit of exploring. We found a dinosaur “museum”. It was basically just a small retail building that had been converted to display some life-sized and realistic looking plastic dinosaur statues under poor lighting (maybe why they looked realistic?). It wasn’t a long tour, but Izzy did enjoy seeing the dinosaurs. Sadly, we were staying kind of out of season for Branson, so Andy Williams and Yakov Smirnoff didn’t have any shows, but we did drive past Yakov’s theater.

Leaving Branson, we resumed our drive north. A missed exit allowed us to take a nice tour of the west side of Kansas City before we stopped for the night in St. Joseph.

The next day we had a quick drive into Omaha and managed to back the rig into Charlotte’s grandma’s driveway.

We had made it! After nine months away, it was good to be back in Nebraska.

See you down the road.