Over the weekend, Erin, the kids and I went to Bentonville, Arkansas to visit our friends Travis & Amber and enjoy a family vacation, our first family vacation since May 2011. My wife tells me that I am a completely different person when I visit Arkansas, and she is probably right, I felt much more relaxed and happy. Arkansas has much more nature and scenery and the road system is much more what I am used to; single lane ‘scenic’ highways through rolling wooded hills, which I love!
We drove across to Arkansas on Thursday afternoon, arriving a little after 6pm; taking roughly 4 1/2 hours to get to our destination with a 10 minute stop to top up on snacks and drinks in Parsons, Kansas; a few miles before crossing the Missouri border. The journey was fairly pleasant, no dramas, averaged about 55 – 60mph taking the single lane highway, US400 most of the way there.
We just chilled out and ate dinner when we arrived, preparing for the next day, which we intended to go visit some caves, but didn’t get ourselves together quick enough and didn’t leave the house until past 11am, so we decided to visit Rogers open air mall and my wife spent about $250 on herself and the kids. The Bentonville/Rogers area is so much better than Wichita, everything is clean, buildings are well maintained, every just looks nice. In the early evening, Erin and I went to look at some apartments as we would like to move to the area, and we found the apartments to be much better maintained and the apartments were spacious and well appointed for much less than the equivalent apartment in Wichita! Although we were baffled by one apartment community’s policy of allowing dogs and cats upto 15lbs but not allowing rabbits, which doesn’t make any sense!
On Friday evening, our friends arranged a babysitter for us so would could have a night out without the kids, our destination of choice was the Rowdy Beaver on Dickson (Fayetteville), which our friends own, we had a great time there, having a good few drinks and a meal, I had the Philly Chicken Cheese with fries, which was amazing! Best of all, our friend Travis drove us there and back so we could relax and enjoy a few drinks without worrying about driving back to their house!
On Saturday, we did manage to visit two caves, the Cosmic Caverns, near Berryville, AR and the Mystic Caverns near Harrison, AR. You can see photographs of both caves on my Facebook profile, click here for Cosmic Caverns and here for Mystic Caverns. Absolutely amazing experience, it’s amazing what natural processes can create, look and the photos and you’ll understand what I mean!
Then it was suddenly time to load up the car and head home to Kansas, not that we wanted to leave, we wanted to hit up some more attractions, although probably for the best as we had spent much more money than we intended. Erin and I have an additional trip for just us, the mother-in-law and aunt will take the kids for a few days. We’ll be heading out to Dallas, TX in a few weeks.