Second Day- Crater of Diamonds State Park and Hot Springs & Trevor's Birthday. August 26, 2008

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Happy 9th Birthday Trevor!
In the morning we dug for diamonds. It was very hot outside! We didn’t find any diamonds, but lots of other rocks like Jasper, Mica, Calcite, and Quartz. When we were done, we drove to Hot Springs. We Went to the summit of the mountain there and we could see the whole city from up there! We saw the bathhouses from over 100 years ago and there were showers, tubs, and cooling rooms. There was one room with a huge stained glass window on the ceiling. We watched a movie about Hot Springs and learned a lot about it. Hot Springs used to be a wild west town! We also saw some of the spring and got to touch the water. It was 143 degrees! They had places around the city where you could fill up your water bottles with hot springs water to take home. We took a few of those with us. We drove through Hot springs then into the Ozark mountains. We took a beautiful scenic trail through the mountains, and saw the sun going down when we reached the top. We hadn’t been able to find a camp before the sun went down, so we had to keep going. We saw a town on the map that looked bigger then the rest near us, called Jasper, and decided to drive the 30 miles more to it. When we got near, we saw a collapsed road! Then we got very worried about our part of the road collapsing. We finally got to Jasper, but it turned out that the population was in the 400’s and they didn’t have anywhere we could camp. We kept going and saw a 18-Wheeler that had come around the turn too fast and slid into the side of the mountain and flipped over. The road down the mountain was very steep. They even had a runway truck lane! Thankfully, we didn’t have to use it.. We found the Buffalo national river state park entrance, and decided to camp there at around 9:30 PM. The road was really bumpy, steep, and long. It was very hard to control the trailer. We drove 5 miles on that road without finding the campsite, when we finally came to it. Kind of. We parked in the grass and probably took up two campsites, but we were too tired to care. We didn’t get much sleep and ended up driving to Harrison, a town about 30 miles from the Missouri border. We spent the night in a Wal-Mart parking lot then.

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Comments

[Angel]

wow!
wow, i bet that was very stressful. Well, good job! you made it though that! Sounds like so far everything else has been good and fun. I am going to the next day now, i cant wait to see what happens....love ya, Be safe