The Roads are Dark and Long, and All those Country Songs

Little Rock, AR to Ozark National Forest AR via Hot Springs NP (11/22)
Ozark National Forest AR to Amarillo TX (11/23)
Amarillo TX to Alamosa CO (11/24):

Lots of driving with little to divert us for a couple days. Starting in western Arkansas past the Ozarks, the scenery started to change from what we are used to on the East Coast. The Oklahoma and Texas plains were even more Willa Cather-esque than those of Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota, though we saw those earlier states a couple months ago before the harvest when everything was still fertile-looking.
We did manage to keep with a couple of our road trip sub-themes in these days:

National parks: Calling Hot Springs a national park is a bit like cheating. It’s in the Ozarks, so it’s scenic, but so is a lot of the country. The hot springs themselves (from what we could tell) can only be accessed by going through private spas. I guess it was a big deal back in the day when people took to the hot springs to cure various physical ailments, but it doesn’t really feel quite on the same level as the other national parks in the U.S. The town of Hot Springs is the hometown of Bill Clinton, but the park was designated back in the 1920s, so that doesn’t explain it. Ah well, check it off the list.




Civil rights historical sites: In 1957, after the Little Rock School Board decided to comply with Brown v. Board by gradually integrating the schools a few students at a time, the governor of the state overruled the school board to prevent integration from happening at all. To enforce the order, he sent the Arkansas National Guard to Central High School to prevent 10 African-American teenagers from entering the school. A large mob formed outside and journalists formed a buffer between the students and the mob to prevent them from injury. Nine of the teenagers continued to try to enroll over the coming weeks, and at the Little Rock mayor’s request, President Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne to enforce the Supreme Court’s ruling and allow the students to enter school. This was the first time since Reconstruction that federal troops had been used to enforce civil rights. Although the students gained entry, their school year was filled with verbal and physical threats and assaults, and the following year the entire school district shut down to avoid integrating further. The schools later reopened, but white flight was already well underway. Today, there is a sleek new national historic site across the street from Central High School (which is still functioning as a school) that tells the story with multimedia and eyewitness accounts.

Camping: In what will probably be our only camping for awhile because it’s FREEZING!!!, we found a nice campsite (though much farther from the interstate than expected) near the Arkansas-Oklahoma border.

Cars stuck in the ground: Outside of Amarillo TX along I-40 is Cadillac Ranch, where a number of spray-painted Cadillacs stick out of the ground at the same angle at Cheops Pyramid in Egypt. Not much more to say about that.



-M