Well folks, we're reaching the one year anniversary of all things Covid. For a lot of people, spring break was the last normal week before things came to a halt. Last year for spring break we were definitely concerned about Covid, but we went camping with our friends. It was once we got back into cell service that we heard lots of announcements about things closing down. I've documented this year pretty well, so no need to digress.
Here we are a year later and there does seem to be a bit of hope on the horizon. With vaccines in full swing, case numbers have dropped a lot across the country. It's the kind of hope that leaves you a little leery, because we felt that way over the summer and it took a good 7 months to recover from that second wave of infections. Our state removed its mask mandate and opened businesses to 100%, which some people hate and some people love. I think the only thing I hate about it is that a state-wide mandate took some of the pressure off the individual businesses to deal with uncooperative customers. Now it's up to each business to set their protocols, and it can be really hard to enforce when the state no longer requires it. There have already been too many violent altercations over not wearing a mask in a store.
As we move forward, it is nice to feel good about traveling and being a bit more at ease about everything. For our Spring Break we decided to travel to another national park that was in the opposite direction of Big Bend. You can see our Big Bend blog post here. This time we headed East to Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas!
Just like Big Bend, we rented an RV from Lackland AFB and had ourselves another awesome camping adventure. I can totally see us buying an RV in the future. I'm getting too old to tent camp, lol.
Driving to and from Arkansas was only meant to be an 8 hour drive, but when you're trailing an RV with Dan's Nissan Xterra, plan on it taking 12 hours at least. We had to get gas, a lot, and we couldn't drive all that fast. That leaves lots of audiobook time!
Traditional "we're on the road" picture
The boys love it when Carson falls asleep on them
A little arm wrestling while waiting for dinner
Cade has grown significantly since we were in this same type of RV for the big bend trip!
First, I want to tell you about our RV site. We decided to stay at Treasure Isle RV park, and picked a waterfront property. It may have cost a little more than the other sites, but it was definitely worth it. Our RV park in big bend was basically packing the RVs together like sardines. Here in Arkansas we could spread out a bit, have room to wander, have our own fire pit, picnic table and pier, and even had enough room to play cornhole! It was a little piece of heaven. Who knew Arkansas could be so pretty!
Alex spotted a crawfish!
The boys somehow always ended up on our bed...
One evening we played Uno the way the teenagers play it these days, and it lasted for like an hour! Glad to say I was the one to win and end the torture ;)
Can't be family time without games! This one is Space Park. We also played another new favorite called Sequoia
Living the RV life!
On our first full day in Arkansas we decided to explore the national park and go to a bath house. This national park isn't like any other one we've been to. It's basically part of the downtown area in Hot Springs. Like literally, across the street from the National park sign is a whole main street of shops and restaurants. You can drive through the park for free, and go up in an observation tower for a fee. There are multiple gift shops and visitor centers/museums with so much national park merch, it's kind of crazy. Some bigger parks we've been to have had way less! We like to collect a magnet, a postcard, a sticker for dan's suitcase, and a smashed penny. Exploring this national park was more like a scenic drive and some downtown shopping. There's one place in the national park that you can actually feel the hot springs without paying. Other than that you can choose from a number of bath houses on bath house row!
Here's the one spot open to the public to feel the hot springs
Can you spot the steam coming off the rocks?
Always climbing
Hot Springs, AK has a rich gangster history, with a massive museum dedicated to just that. We settled for a photo-op with Al Capone.
Ok, I know this is random, but in this gift shop, the bedazzled picture frames were filled with old pictures of Hillary Duff. What the what?
Behind the row of bath houses is this really nice promenade
Observation tower at the height of the National Park. It allowed for spectacular views of Hot Springs, AK, and served as a form of exercise for Dan and Cade who raced on the stairs both up and back down!
Alex insisted I include this picture because his favorite video game is called Earthbound.
We chose to go to the Quapaw bath house because it was the only one that allows the family to experience it together. The other bath houses offer individual treatments that seem pretty cool, but we wouldn't really get to hang out. The Quapaw has four thermal pools that are each a different temperature, ranging from 96-104. We spent a few hours moving from pool to pool and getting the long day of driving off the body. :)
We thought we had spotted Ted Cruz on another vacation from his job!
Reluctantly including this so you can see the cool knee rest that comes up on these chairs
Our second day in Arkansas we spent at Crater of Diamonds State Park. This was about an hour and fifteen minutes from Hot springs, and is a really neat place where you can dig/mine for diamonds. Anything you find you get to keep! As you can expect there is a whole community of people who are really into this and have all the special tools and tricks to make this successful. We knew going into that we wouldn't likely find a diamond, but what a cool experience! Dan and Alex did all the hard work, as I knew I wouldn't be up for it, and Cade was being a true teenager about this activity. I wasn't going to force him to dig in the mud, so the two of us hung out with the puppy, did some surface searching, chatted and Cade listened to his audiobook. I neglected to take very many pictures, but we rented some tools to try our best at following the process. After digging, dry sifting and wet sifting, we left with a whole bunch of 'gravel' that is drying out in our back yard to be sorted and searched for any treasure!
Pictures of mom sleeping might become a new thing, lol. Actually I think Cade was more interested in the spider on my hat.
One the way home we snapped a few roadside pics. Man, if we had stopped at all the weird/unusual things we saw on the roadside of this trip, we'd probably still be there! Here's alex with two of his favorite characters that were outside a motel for some reason. And then on the way to the diamond place I saw this fire truck sticking out of the ground, so I caught a picture of it on our way back home. They even had a mailbox that matched their fire truck but we didn't notice that until we had passed it.
Alex took this pic. I thought it was a pretty typical Cade look these days
And here's our haul! It's drying and about ready to be examined much closer.
Our third day in Arkansas we headed to Ouachita National Forest for some off-roading. This too was about an hour and a half away, and we explored the forest with Dan's Xterra. Unfortunately, the trails he had researched and decided to go to were actually ATV trails, not meant for commercial sized vehicles. So from where we were in the national forest we attempted to find a couple of other neat landmarks. I'm actually really glad we found Little Missouri Falls. It was a really short hike with a beautiful reward at the end. I really miss hiking. So to be out in nature without it draining me was really nice. Dan, Alex and I headed down to the water while Cade decided to climb some big boulders and then head the rest of the way up the mountain. (don't worry it wasn't too big) I loved being surrounded by the noise of the waterfall and the weather was just perfect. Dan and Alex had fun skipping and collecting rocks to skip later back at our RV site. Dan handed me a bunch of 'coin rocks' that I made a little cairn out of. I know these are illegal in some places, but i promise, these were about the size of a dime in thickness and the whole thing was maybe an inch and half high. It was not going to keep someone from going the right way on a trail, or distract from the beauty. It was off to the side, and fun activity in stacking, and it is now my favorite picture on my phone. I even made it my lock screen.
Oh! And Cade got some practice driving a manual too! He did way better than I did while first learning!
Yup, that's a picture of an ATV... no cars allowed
This is what happens when you make your own path to the top of a mountain. The next few pictures are from Cade's adventure to the top
This is Dan's crocodile, Wags, and he loves to off road
On our last full day in Arkansas we stayed close and explored more in Hot Springs. We spent the morning looking at a few shops that hadn't been open our first day there, and got a second round of cupcakes from Fat Bottomed Girls Cupcakes. They were obviously good if we had to get more of them just a few days later! We returned to the RV for lunch (and to drop off the dog), and then headed back downtown for our last big activity- an escape room! I am so glad we chose the company we did. They were great to work with, offered us a military discount, and had lots of other fun things to do on site while waiting for your room to be ready. We ended up doing two rooms because the story lines went together. The puzzles in each room were very different that ones we had encountered as a family before. They were challenging, unique, and fun. We escaped both rooms, even though it was pretty close on the second room. Yay! How fun!
We finished the first escape room with 21 minutes left! I think the second room was more like 10 minutes...?
This was a game called Human Zoo. We were locked in a cage and each had 4 buttons in front of us. The computer assumed humans were too stupid to work together and escape, so we had to solve a bunch of riddles. If you got too many wrong, you lost. We escaped! It was really fun.
They even had a huge arena and different robots you could battle with. How cool is that?
I loved the pacing of our trip and that we had a good mix of nature and touristy stuff. Every evening we had time to relax, shower, make dinner and enjoy a treat. Sometimes we had a fire, sometimes not. Not all of our meals required it. Dan will maybe disagree with relaxing in the evenings because of how much work he put into our fires. The first day we tried a fire it turned out the wood we brought from home was still wet enough that it wouldn't ever catch. Of course that was the night we needed a fire for dinner, so dan worked hard to get it hot enough to create some coals that would cook our meal. I even ran to the store to get some different firewood and it still wouldn't catch. At first we thought it was because the new and the old wood had gotten mixed up. So the next night for s'mores we made sure we only used the new wood and it still wouldn't catch!! Dan was beyond frustrated, having never worked so hard for a fire in his life. One of our RV neighbors had had a roaring fire going all night, and to my shock, dan went over to them and asked them if they had any wood they'd be willing to spare. Turns out it was their last night and they did have extra wood that they didn't want to haul back with them. Dan offered to pay them, or exchange our wet wood that could dry out by the next time they needed it, but they just let us have it. It made all the difference and we had a HUGE fire the rest of the night. I loved just sitting out there all evening. We told stories, did some truth or dare, made s'mores and then watched the coals glow until it was time to go to bed.
And a few last pics from our drive home. We stopped at Texarkana, a city that straddles the border of Texas and Arkansas. That post office behind us in the picture below is actually in both states!
If this isn't a result of Covid, I don't know what is. RVs cant go through the drive through, and the dining room was closed. Here's dan walking through the drive through, lol
If you were looking for Fate, I found it!
What a weird and awesome dog we have
Before we knew it, it was time to head back to San Antonio. Seemed like the perfect length of trip and allowed for a few days to recover before going back to work and school. Daylight Savings Time messed that up a bit though, darn time change.
Lastly I just want to document the ways that this trip was different for me because of my health. The week leading up to our trip was terrible for me fatigue wise. I'm usually the one to shop and pack and gather, but I couldn't do any of that. I made lists and tried to oversee things and keep myself from overdoing. Other notable differences;
Loading up the RV looked more like me sitting in the RV telling the boys where to put stuff.
Lists can only do so much, because my brain fog can be quite substantial at times, there were a good amount of things we forgot to bring. Like the whole carton of eggs, and the ground beef for tacos. I know for a fact if I was more like the Laura from before, that wouldn't have happened
Driving to and from Arkansas, i slept a lot in the car. I used to be a better helper with driving!
First day doing the bath house was great! Walking around the downtown, not as easy. After two shops I could feel that fatigue setting in. That's never a good sign when you're still in the middle of an activity and you feel it. I stubbornly and slowly walked the promenade all the way back to the car, but was totally unable to help with dinner when we got back to the RV.
Second day diamond digging I would've totally been up in the mud and participating!
A hike would definitely have been planned- it was so pretty there
I hated needing to sleep so much and missing out on things like games of cornhole and helping cook and chatting/relaxing
Walking to and from the bathrooms from the RV wouldn't be such a chore.
Getting home and unpacking, cleaning the RV, laundry, and all that jazz- holy crap. I may be recovering for a week or so! Sunday I was pretty much toast. I fell asleep soon after waking up on Sunday and slept in the afternoon after church. Sigh. So much ZzZzZzZzZz- mentally and physically!
It's hard for me to accept this as my new norm. I am glad that we were able to go on the trip. We can still create memories as a family. My boys can learn to be much more involved with helping, and I'm learning a different level of patience. Patience with myself. If I push it or force it, I pay for it later, and that means I'm basically out for a whole day. I'm still learning just how much to push and pull to feel productive, like i'm contributing, without lowering my overall baseline of activity. Even after taking a bit to write this, (haven't done the pictures yet) I'm feeling totally wiped. I appreciate all the prayers that have been said for me. Keep them coming, I may be on the verge of an explanation to this all.
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