We went to some pretty cool HOT places on our annual family vacation in 2014. Our major destination was Big Bend National Park but we stopped at a bunch of places on the way there and back home. My Dad used this website called Roadtrippers that tells you all kinds of interesting things to see or do or eat or sleep in a city or along the driving route that you are taking to your final destination.
We spent the first night of our trip in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Eureka Springs is located in the Northwest part of the Arkansas Ozarks. It's considered both a historic place (its on the National Register of Historic Places) and a resort village. Native and European Americans thought that the springs had healing powers so Eureka received much attention early on for this reason. We went though because we wanted to stay in America's most haunted hotel, the Crescent Hotel and Day Spa. We booked a haunted hotel overnight package which included a guided haunted hotel tour, 2 "I Survived a Night at the Crescent" t-shirts, and a ghost foam toy souvenir. Here, Dad and I are sitting in the hotel lobby, looking at the ghost photos, waiting for our ghost tour to begin.
After having survived the night at the haunted Crescent Hotel, we stopped in Bentonville, Arkansas, where Sam Walton started his first Walmart. There is a Walmart Museum and an old-fashioned malt shop there. I'm wearing a name tag with my name spelled out in barcode. Next stop, Texas!
We spent a little bit of time in Odessa, Texas because they had lots of historical things to do like visit the boyhood home of former President George W. Bush (which we did but I did not include any photos). But there were also tons of quirky things to do in Odessa, too.
I give you the World's Largest Hare.
Their version of Stonehenge.
The Odessa Crater.
We finally made it to Big Bend National Park. Big Bend NP is not the biggest of the US National Parks (that belongs to Wrangell-St. Elias in Alaska) nor is it the smallest (which is, depending on your source, the St. Louis Arch or Hot Springs) but it is one of the hottest and remotest of the continental US National Parks. As a result, this makes Big Bend NP one of the least visited National Parks. In 2014, when we were there, they had ~314,000 for the year (by comparison the Great Smoky Mountain NP, which is considered the most visited NP had just over 10 million visitors that same year). Winter is the busy season in Big Bend so we practically had the park to ourselves in July. Big Bend is actually one of my Mom's favorite National Parks. It's very beautiful. And we saw a lot of bears and got to swim in hot springs near the Rio Grande River and in the river itself.
After Big Bend NP, we stopped for a few days at the Guadalupe Mountains National Park. Also, had a wonderful time camping in this very scenic place.
We spent some time in one final National Park that summer, Carlsbad Caverns.
We also stopped by Roswell, New Mexico on the way home and spent some time getting to know the locals.
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