We're adding Little Rock to our list of places to return to

It feels like we are working on a list of places that we would like to visit again--when things reopen and we can once again spend time around people. We're adding Little Rock, Arkansas, to our list of places that we will come back to visit under more normal circumstances. We arrived at the Burns Park Campground in North Little Rock, Arkansas, in the middle of the afternoon and immediately knew that we would like it here. The welcome committee consisted of several deer across the meadow from us.

They are used to people in their neighborhood, so they didn't mind posing among the trees for our wildlife pictures of the day.

After being stuck inside at our Walmart parking lot site yesterday, we were ready to stretch our legs. So we were out on the trail next to the campground right away.

We recognized the red flowering plants on our walk as wild buckeyes. We have seen them blooming further south already this year.

We also found other wildflowers blooming near the trail. This lovely purple flower has a not-so-lovely name--spider wort. Denisa doesn't care for spiders or worts, but she does like this flower.

Even though this trail is nice, it is entirely too loud to be one of our favorites. The good news is that Burns Park is close to the interstate for easy access for travelers. The bad news is that the noise of I-40 can be very loud while hiking the trails of the park. We hadn't done much research on Burns Park, so late in the afternoon we drove some of the park roads to explore. That's when we found that the Arkansas River Trail also runs through it. It was already 5 p.m., but we thought a quick bicycle ride down the trail would be fun. So we headed down the river trail to the Big Dam Bridge, just 1.4 miles away.

We don't usually curse on this blog, but we soon found that the Big Dam Bridge was a damn big bridge! It has a long inclining ramp to get to the top.

But that gave us the best view of how wide the Arkansas River is as it flows between Little Rock and North Little Rock.

We're not exactly sure how it happened, but we suddenly realized that we could bike a loop that would take us into the city to cross another bridge, and then return to our campground on the other side. We love loop trails, so we crossed the Big Dam Bridge and pointed our bicycles toward downtown Little Rock about 6 miles away.

Because we hadn't done any research on this loop, we didn't know that the nice level river trail would get lost onto urban streets when we got into Little Rock. We lost the trail and found ourselves in some pretty sketchy parts of the city. We didn't stop to take pictures because it wasn't a very picturesque ride at this point, and we were realizing that we were going to run out of daylight. It wasn't the part of town you would want to hang out after dark. A little further into the city we did stop momentarily for this picture of the Arkansas state capitol a few blocks away. On a normal trip, we would be making plans to visit that state capitol building.

We were riding our bikes hard and fast as we finally got off the city streets and returned to the flat trail along the river once again. Now this is more like it! If it had been earlier in the day, we would have stopped for pictures over and over when we got to the nice section of the river trail in Downtown Little Rock. But instead, we headed quickly towards the Clinton Pedestrian Bridge where we could cross back over the river on this loop ride.

We had to ride our bikes past several bridge before we got to this special pedestrian bridge that is also bicycle-friendly. We're guessing that this area is usually crowded with people strolling through the adjacent downtown parks, enjoying the river and the sculptures in this nice urban setting. But we had the place to ourselves, so we could bike faster than usual. We're also guessing that the local pigeons aren't used to such fast bicyclers. That's probably the reason that one pigeon took off too slowly, and flew right into Denisa's front bicycle wheel. We didn't have time to take a picture, but our second wildlife picture of the day could have been of a dead pigeon that flew into a very surprised bicyclist's wheel.

As we look west, we can see the other bridges of downtown Little Rock that we now have to pedal past going the other direction. We know that we are still 5.9 miles from our car, and we could also see that we didn't have much daylight left for this ride.

We were relieved to see that this part of our loop stayed close to the river, so it was flat. We were also relieved to see that it didn't take us through sketchy neighborhoods here on the North Little Rock side of the Arkansas River Trail.

It was a lovely ride beside the river, watching the sunset as we pedaled . . .

and pedaled . . .

and pedaled.

You can barely see Denisa in the dark in the bottom left-hand corner of the picture below as we finally got back inside Burns Park.

It was a very nice sunset once we could stop and enjoy it. We had thought this was going to be a short bike ride, but we went almost 16 miles this evening!

It was easy to social distance on the bike trail, as no one else was riding by this time of the evening. We were the only car in the parking lot as Mark loaded our bikes.

After a hike, and a longer-than-expected bike ride, we were tired when we got back to the motor home. We slept well, and got up early enough to explore a little more of Burns Park the next morning. It was foggy this morning for our walk along the Arkansas River. We can see that this river can flood. That big log that is caught in that horizontal position so high up in that tree must have been caught there at some flood stage.

We also found that Burns Park has a big softball and soccer complex, two golf courses, a tennis center (that also includes a dozen pickleball courts), "Funland Amusement Park" with kiddy rides, and a good number of playgrounds scattered throughout its 1,700 acres. We also found a nice covered bridge, and miles of hiking trails.

All of these fun areas are roped off and silent because of the coronavirus pandemic. Arkansas is one of the last states to issue stay-at-home orders, and all this fun is now off-limits. We have enjoyed our short time here, and we definitely want to return. We'll ride that Arkansas River Trail again one day, but we'll definitely give ourselves more time to enjoy it. We'll visit the state capitol and enjoy the city. And we'll look forward to enjoying it with people again.