TRAVEL DAY: SALESVILLE, ARKANSAS TO RUSSELLVILLE, ARKANSAS.
Day 46 – It was 29 degrees this morning at 7 a.m., sunny and frost on the grass. A foggy mist was rising off the river. We have a long drive today so we didn’t lounge around, just packed up and left by 9:05 a.m.
The drive was on hilly, winding roads for about 2/3 of the trip, flattening out later. There was a decent amount of traffic, particularly in cities around malls. Oh yeah, it was Black Friday. We found gas for the lowest we’ve seen it since leaving home – $2.86 per gallon – so we filled both the RV and the Honda. We also stopped for lunch in a vacant parking lot. Not a real exciting drive, that’s for sure. But we are observing much more of a western influence around us – cowboy hats and boots, restaurants named Bubba’s something-or-other, plenty of Bar-B-Que restaurants, etc. Never seen so many pickup trucks in my entire life. When people talk, there’s a definite twang, no offense intended, just an observation.
We arrived at our campground, the Old Post Road Park, another Army Corps of Engineers campground, at 1:45 p.m. It was 50 degrees and sunny. The campground host told us to just pick a site, then go to recreation.gov to check availability for the upcoming nights. When we drove through to look for a campsite, we thought, “this place looks familiar; have we stayed here before?” Lo and behold, we did stay here in March of 2018. We looked it up in the Blog, and we liked this Park then & we like it now. Ah, the life of an almost-full-time RVer, we can’t even remember all the places we’ve been. LOL.
Most of the campsites were taken, particularly the ones overlooking the Arkansas River. And there were people behind us driving through, also. By the time we got online and entered our favorite campsite, someone else had gotten it. But we did get our 2nd favorite campsite for two nights. The weekend will be over after that, and if we wanted to stay longer, we figured we could just move if needed. We moved into site #24, right on the River, and we love it!
We overlook the River; to the north there is the dam. After we’d settled in, Rob saw a Cooper’s Hawk just in front of our campsite near the water. He got a picture. Then later after uncorking the wine and opening a beer, we saw lots of birds on the water. Somewhat identified, we had lots of White Pelicans and lots of some kind of Sea Gull. Rob is going to go out to the water’s edge tomorrow morning when the lighting is right to get pictures. We also heard a loud engine noise and we started grumbling about those damn pickup trucks and why don’t they put mufflers on them. Oops. We turned around to see a Tug Boat pushing a large River Barge upriver right in front of our campsite. Cool! The high today was 53 degrees and continually sunny, no wind.
