PECAN GROVE RV IN LAKE VILLAGE, ARKANSAS wasn’t at all like what we had hoped. We had planned to stay two nights but it was raining so hard we could barely tell the Lake from the Village. So after hooking up the water, sewer and electric we splashed north to the Arkansas Post National Memorial, takin’ care of business today so we could leave tomorrow.
What used to be Arkansas Post
Arkansas Post is a classic “used to be” site. Once a trading post used by the French and Quapaw Indians, it was the first European settlement in the lower Mississippi Valley. It used to be on the Arkansas River, but the river changed course several times and the Post moved along with it. It used to be the capital of the Arkansas Territory. It used to have a series of strategic forts, long gone. It used to sit on the bluffs, but the river level has risen. Archeologists find it interesting, but there isn’t much to see for the uninitiated, especially on a rainy April Sunday. At least we weren’t riding motorcycles like the other visitors today!
A wet day for riding
Things were looking better on the road to Texarkana. The rain slowed and eventually stopped. The newly emerged leaves tint everything yellow-green, highlighting the white dogwood blossoms within the woods. Red azaleas and lavender wisteria provide both color and perfume. And pollen.
Oh, Springtime — a-a-choo!
Sunrise RV Resort is a large gravel parking lot off I-30 in the Arkansas part of Texarkana. But it has cable TV, the wi-fi is reasonable and the bathrooms are spotless. Best of all, it’s dry — hardly a puddle to be seen anywhere. And it isn’t far from Hope, our last National Park site in the Lower 48. Hope, in case you’ve forgotten, is the birthplace and boyhood home of William Jefferson Clinton.
President William Jefferson Clinton's Birthplace Home NHS
In my 70+ years the United States has had several presidents who, like Goldilocks, were “just right” for the times. Harry Truman, Ike, JFK perhaps and maybe even Ronnie Reagan. You may not have trusted “Slick Willy” and would like to lock up his wife, but for my money, Bill Clinton was the best president in my lifetime.
Modest beginnings
You can’t tell much about Clinton from his childhood home, or rather his grandparents' home — he moved away when he was 7 — but Hope is the kind of town a future “leader of the Free World” should come from. It’s the kind of town we grew up in.
