Road Trip - Day 4

Last night was interesting. We stayed in by far the worst motel for the trip. The room was unpleasant. The place was too close to the road so we heard trucks all night. Neither of us slept worth a damn. When we got back on the road we remembered we hadn't filled our tank the night before. As I looked at the gas gauge, it looked way too low. It seems somebody came by and siphoned about 1/4 of a tank while we slept poorly!

Today was a day of changes. We changed from the hills of the Appalachians to the flat lands west of the Mississippi. The roads are built 20-40 feet above the fields, which are huge! Some are 1/2 mile square. There is rice, with canals curving through in pairs like old flooded tracks. There is corn and wheat in amazing abundance - square miles visible from this road alone! The land here is flatter than piss on a platter.

The weather changed as well. Coming down I-81 and across I-40 we had temperatures in the 70s and 80s. Continuing west today we had 90s all the way. Strangely, the heat seemed a lot drier than what we sometimes get in NJ. It is a lot easier to handle.

The roads today were unusually crowded with trucks. They came in strings of ten or more in some cases. It seemed that they played leapfrog for miles and miles, frustrating all of us that wanted to go faster.

For our excursion today we broke away from I-30 after Little Rock and drove over to Hot Springs. This is a town that had a strong peak in the early 1900s with its development of spa properties. The historic district is lined with beautiful architecture. There are many beautiful low buildings (2 and 3 stories) for blocks and blocks, each of which was a spa. Note the restored building below that houses the National Park Visitor Center. In one of these buildings I once visited a museum to the spa trade. It contained a large variety of very strange water and electrical devices, designed to torture health into the unsuspecting. It isn't clear if any of it worked.
















In the picture below you can see the detailed window frames and moldings.


















We moved on then to the Crater of Diamonds State Park, south of Hot Springs. This park is devoted to an upwelling of diamond-bearing soils. It is an open field of dirt where people dig up buckets of material, and then use sieves and water to remove the soil. Then they inspect their gravel and rock remains to see if they got any diamonds.
















Here is E, scrubbing away the mud and soil from the rocks. You can rent a "basic kit" inexpensively. It contains a shovel, a 5 gallon pail, and a pair of sieves (coarse and fine). You dig up soil wherever you want, then take it to a covered pavilion (the sun is brutal). There you wash it through your sieves, then despair when no diamonds show up.

Most people, including us, don't get a thing. Here is our handful of what turned out to be common rocks (calcite and jasper). Apparently, if you stick to it as some locals have, you can make a fortune finding even gem quality diamonds. At least we still have the $85 million PowerBall tickets! Maybe they'll be the right ones this time.

After a couple of hours of excitement we motored on down the road into Texas. It also has a lot of trucks! We spend our night in Sulphur Springs, resting up for a morning run to Austin. Much better motel this time.