Friday, June 09, 2000
Natural Falls State Park - June 9
We're at another lovely state park -- Natural Falls SP, just about 6 miles west of the OK/AR border along route 412. We have walked to the falls and they are lovely. It is a beautiful park with wide, level, shaded sites that have water & electric hookups. We arrived just in time to get the last available site. Sometimes our luck amazes us! We have been "adopted" by a friendly group of Good Samers -- the Redbud chapter from Oklahoma City -- and have been invited over for games last night and a pot luck & more games tonight. If we want to extend our stay an extra day, there are even more tempting adventures for tomorrow. We will probably continue on our original schedule so we can arrive in CO around 6/20.After Ferne Clyffe State Park, which we found more beautiful as we further explored the hiking trails, we spend one night in Poplar Bluff, MO. We continued on to Hardy, AR, where we spend two nights camped near Spring Creek (the "creeks" out here are rivers by our standards). There was an antique car show right down the road from the campground, so we got to see all the old cars driving past and then later we attended the show. Most of the cars were 50s or 60s vintage, though there were some older; there was also a Corvette contingent with "antiques" from the 80s to mid-90s. It was fun to see the old cars.
We also walked around historic Hardy and visited some shops. Willie succumbed to temptation at the local cross stitch shop. We drove to a nearby state park, Mammoth Spring SP, which is home to the tenth largest spring in the world (over 9 million gallons per hour, on average). It was amazing to see all that water being produced. Due to all the agricultural usage of chemicals, the water was not clean, even though it looked beautiful. We saw several families of Wood Duck on the lake there.
Next we headed for Turkey Creek RV Park, an Escapee park in Hollister, MO, just south of Branson, for four nights. We checked out Branson but did not go to any shows -- they were too expensive for our budget and interests. We did do a "Ride the Ducks" tour of Branson and the nearby lake. These tours are done on converted military DUKW's, an amphibious military craft that was used in WWII. That was quite silly & fun. Our other indulgence was to tour some caverns in West Branson. They were quite lovely. Some RVers from Australia recommended that we check out the opulent bathrooms at the Shoji Tabuchi Theater, so we nonchalantly strolled in and checked them out. Quite amazing! The men's even has a pool table. The women's has hallways of stalls with tall, carved oak doors. Gold fixtures and flower arrangements are everywhere. Branson is very spread out, so you can't just park and walk around. You are forced to drive everywhere and sit in traffic jams. That's good when you are sightseeing and want to look around anyway, but it would be horrible to live there and have to do errands that way. Other activities we did were a winery tour & tasting (free), visit Table Rock Dam visitor center & nature trail (free) and try out a 2.99 breakfast buffet (good value).
# posted by Doug and Willie @ 9:00 AM 
