It turned out that the site we chose with no orange cone was indeed the last “walk-in” site available to suit our coach. We are in north central Arkansas, not far from Missouri. We have had some beautiful weather and it has rained. As I am writing we have just cleared a tornado watch, and a severe Thunderstorm watch is on as is flood watch. The weather map suggests at the very least we will have rain soon – whenever soon is, but clear in the morning when we prepare to leave. I doubt we would have stayed so long, 6 nights, here if it weren’t for the Memorial Day Holiday. We had our doubts about finding a campsite from Friday and Saturday night with all the camping families looking to get out for their first camp out of the season.
The TripAdvisor list of attractions has three items, Bull Shoals Dam, Ozark Folk Art Center and a cavern. Other interesting activities included wine tasting at Raimondo’s Winery. We headed for the winery first, as the website said the wines were grown and pressed in California and shipped in tanks to Arkansas for aging and bottling. We had a blast. Gil and Joanne Rainmondo are lively hosts and love to talk. We agreed to the complete wine tasting, expecting the flight of five wines to taste and some biscuits to clear our palettes. We had a surprise, they sell olive oils, Balsamic vinegar, and several dips and spreads. The tasting encompassed all those categories. After an hour we were full and had drunk more wine than we expected, we did slow down the pour by saying we were more interested in tasting than drinking 🙂 We enjoyed the wines, buying a couple of bottles of a blend and a bottle of a port like drink. The balsamic vinegar and the oil were also exceptional leading us to buy some of those too. We have to be careful with these purchases as storage space is at a premium. We tottered back to the coach after our tasting to relax over our books and then head out to the highly rated Thai restaurant in town. It is actually run by a Thai immigrant and is surprisingly authentic for its location.
The next day we decided to head for the Ozark Folk Center. Uncharacteristically we did not check it out with the GPS. We had seen a sign on the road pointing toward it and figured we would just follow the signs. We thought we would like to arrive around 2:30 or so to have time to tour the crafts and then have dinner followed by the show. After driving for 15 or 20 minutes it became clear that we didn’t have a clue where we were going or how far. We got out the GPS and learned we still had 36 miles to go and to expect it to take up to an hour! these mountain roads do not go in straight lines. We arrived shortly after 3 PM and the artisans and gift shop close at 5. Even though we were given tickets for the next day we decided to make the best of it and get around to the artisans whose work we would most enjoy. Dinner at the Skillet followed and it was better than we had expected and surprising given the very low prices. Part of the savings was due to the fact we were in a dry county 🙁 There seems to be a lot of that in the South. We had plenty of time to repark the Jeep in the shuttle lot and take the shuttle to the music venue. This is a large round hall that seats 1,000 and it was about 2/3 full for Willy Watson, a solo folk singer with pretensions, actually almost as good as his hype, he was formerly with old Crow Medicine Show. The opening group were Lazy Goat String Band Trio. We enjoyed them greatly. They were joined by a dancer for two numbers, one a hornpipe and the other not particularly a dance.
9 o’clock saw us heading out to the parking lot for the hour plus drive back to Gee Whiz. The mountain road was pretty empty by then, but the campground was jumping as we pulled in at 10:15. The site next to us was crawling with kids, dogs and somewhat inebriated adults. They went on past quiet hour, not unexpected on a holiday weekend, but come our bedtime they were quieting down. The impending rain and storm has caused several people to move on a day early. We are hoping to let the storm roll on by as it is forecast to be taking the same route we plan on. Maybe by tomorrow we will be behind it, just need to go slow enough not to pass it.
We will be sure to include Arkansas in our travel plans in the future. We did come through another part of the state in 2002 and I think again before we figured out we needed to go further south in January.