Happy Birthday to Mark!

We are literally winding our way through the state of Arkansas! After winding out of the little roads at White Cliffs campground, we headed north towards Mena, Arkansas. Here we joined highway 88, part of the Talimena scenic drive that people flock to in the autumn for its fall foliage. As we started this part of our drive today, we noted that the trees in Mena are all leafed out.

The sign at Mena warned of steep and winding roads for the next twelve miles. They aren't kidding!

As we drove higher, we also got some views above the trees. This is the kind of highway that we would have avoided in our motor home six years ago. But Mark has driven so many mountain roads that he didn't even blink at the steep drop-offs on both sides of these narrow winding roads as we approached our destination.

Besides, he's the one that picked this destination for his birthday. Long ago, we made a decision that the person celebrating a birthday gets to plan their special day. He gets to decide the activities, the location, the meal, the dessert--everything about what we will do on his birthday. It's the job of the other spouse to gladly agree with that plan. This isn't hard, since we both seem to enjoy the same things. So we pulled into our camping spot at Queen Wilhelmina State Park that Mark chose. Denisa questioned his decision to stay right beside the train tracks. It's a good thing that the child-sized Glory Railroad isn't running during the off-season, or we would have had some loud train traffic right outside our window.

It didn't take us long to get started on one of Mark's planned birthday activities--hiking. We'll actually be here several days, so we started at the Lover's Leap Trail.

This one-mile loop trail would be slower than usual, when Denisa found out that it had great wildflowers on it. These sweet little miniature irises were in large groups on both sides of the trail.

We found only one of these unusual plants, but the sunshine lit it up beautifully for its picture. We feel like we are wandering in God's wonders today.

This plant must be a relative of the mountain trillium, with its three outside leaves, three inner leaves, and three-part bloom.

Besides all the wildflowers on the ground, the red bud trees are in their spring glory on the Lover's Leap trail.

The trees are just beginning to leaf out here at this higher elevation, and some of the tiny leaves are colors of pink and red. Is that because they will also be those colors in the fall?

Lover's Leap is a loop trail that starts and ends at the lodge at Wilhelmina State Park. The viewpoint here gives an uninterrupted look for miles around at this high elevation. We are 1,400 feet higher than the town of Mena where we started our drive. While the trees were leafed out in town, you can see that the trees on top of Rich Mountain are still bare.

We took another hike the next morning, which was actually Mark's day of birth. As you can tell from the coat and gloves, it was a brisk morning here on Rich Mountain as we made the hikes on the Spring Trail and the Reservoir Trail.

Fewer wildflowers on these hikes, but Mark still felt the love from this heart-shaped fallen log on the trail this morning.

We took a morning hike on his birthday for two reasons. One reason was that a colder front with fierce winds was scheduled to arrive in the afternoon. That did happen right on schedule. The other reason was that we had to be near a computer at exactly 1:00 this afternoon. We had found that Denali National Park in Alaska, was opening reservations to a very special opportunity at that time. Visitors to this national park are only allowed to drive their vehicles 15 miles into the park. Transportation deeper into the park is only provided on park buses. But with Covid restrictions that limit the number of passengers on these buses, they have decided to allow passenger vehicles to travel an additional 15 miles into Denali National park--all the way to Teklanika. They will allow only 25 vehicles per day, and they will be spaced in groups an hour apart. A spot in one of the coveted 7 spaces at 9 a.m. would be great, as those passengers will be allowed into the park earlier than even the buses can get on that road. So Mark spent part of his birthday poised at the computer, with the web site open and ready to make that reservation for our upcoming Alaska trip.

At exactly 1 p.m. central time (10 a.m. Alaska time) the link opened and Mark clicked on the 9:00 timed entry permit. He got one! We are so excited! By the time he quickly filled out the $25 payment information, he clicked back on the permit page. Within the first five minutes of opening, 21 of the 25 permits were purchased for our day. Within an hour almost all of the 25 permits for every day were sold out for the entire summer. Good job Mark, in using part of your birthday for Alaska trip planning!

We spent the rest of the afternoon inside to avoid the cold winds. We made home-made ice cream to go with the German chocolate cake that Mark requested for his birthday dessert.

We actually had cake and ice cream with breakfast and again for lunch--because when it's your birthday you can make choices like that. As you might have noticed from the decorations inside the motor home, this is a big birthday for Mark!

We finished the day at the very nice restaurant at the Queen Wilhelmina Lodge. We had their steak dinner, and they added a slice of hummingbird cake for dessert since we were celebrating a birthday. It was his third slice of cake today!

It was a nice stop at a very nice Arkansas state park. Denisa thinks Mark did a good job of planning this special birthday for her very special guy! Happy Birthday to Mark!

Where are the white cliffs of White Cliffs Campground?

We headed to our next camping spot at White Cliffs Corp of Engineer campground on a soggy day. When we arrived, we wondered, "Where did they get that name for this campground?" We saw no white cliffs--only trees and wildflowers. Because this camp site is so isolated, our travel day had stops at Walmart for groceries, and another stop for diesel. There was still rain on the windshield when we finally crossed into Arkansas. Instantly, the speed limit changed from 70 to 55, even though we were on the same highway. Obviously, "the natural state" wants its passengers to drive slowly and enjoy the natural scenery. 

We brag on Texas roads, and we got another reminder that not all states think that wide lanes and big shoulders are important. Our drive into southwest Arkansas today took us through a winding and patched ribbon of highway that wasn't even wide enough to warrant white lines on the crumbling asphalt edges.

Our destination is a Corp of Engineer park that we were surprised to see had an opening for the weekend. Now we know why. It is a little (ahem) off the beaten track. As we drove further on these narrow Arkansas roads, we saw a message on the GPS that we had never seen before, "Leave the road."

That's because this very nice campground is literally at the end of the highway.

Situated right on the Little River, the campsites at the White Cliffs Corp of Engineer campground are separated by that road that just brought us here, and then disappeared into the forest and the wildflowers.

We found out quickly that the main reason to be at White Cliffs campground is the Little River. Actually we see that Little River isn't such a small river.

The main reason to come here is to fish in Little River, and then meet all of your friends and relatives for a fish fry on Saturday night. It seemed like all of the camp sites had three pickups and two boats and 17 chairs circled around the picnic table. So we were a little out of place with our single pickup. With the high-speed boat traffic on the river, we didn't even feel comfortable putting our little inflatable kayak on the water during our stay. We won't have any 18-wheeler truck traffic noise at this camp site, but we certainly do have loud boat traffic.

We have noticed that fishermen tend to bring their dogs camping with them. This little dog was on a tether that allowed him to spend time right under our bedroom window, barking and whining at odd hours of the night.

So even though our stay at the White Cliffs was mostly restful, we have come to appreciate the fact that most dog owners keep their dogs inside their RVs where they can enjoy them. Since we weren't fishing or boating, it was a good place to do research for our upcoming Alaska trip. We got some reservations done and some decisions made about how and where we will travel once we fly to Anchorage. So it was a perfectly relaxing place to be right now (even though we didn't have a very fast internet connection at such a remote location.)

Even though we were remote, the dogs and weekend activity kept the wildlife away. Our only wildlife picture of the stay was this little creature. We are not experts, but we think this is a skink. He was enjoying a little sunshine when Denisa caught him outside of his home in the notch of a log.

But we still had to solve the mystery, "Why is this campground on the river, surrounded by forest and wildflowers, named White Cliffs?"

We found our answer on the third day, when we headed up the only hiking trail in the area. Even though they were totally obscured from our vision at the campground, it didn't take long to find the cliffs of white.

The gate keeper told us that there used to be a mill that mined the white powdery cliffs. The powder was floated down the river in boats and loaded into train cars. It was used to make cement years ago. The mining operation left enough of the cliffs for a short hike for us today.

We've had more rain, so that explains why everything is so richly green here in Arkansas. Our hike was a little muddy, and that mud seemed to stick to our hiking boots like--you guessed it--cement.

During our three-day visit, we got most of our exercise walking the paved highway that suddenly turned into a campground in a forest. But this day we were hiking the white cliffs.

It was a three-day stop where we never moved the pickup. We enjoyed walks down by the Little River for some nice sunset views. We'll count it a successful stay since we accomplished some travel planning and solved the mystery of "Where are the white cliffs of White Cliffs Corp of Engineer Campground?"

We're Going on Vacation! Read on to see where . . .

Some people think that we are always on vacation. But we are really just living in our home like everyone else. It's just that our home can move to new locations that we love to explore. But sometimes we like to leave home and go on vacation. (Note: Denisa takes way too many wildflower pictures on our hikes. So she's going to sneak some into this blog while we talk about vacation plans.)

Vacation planning hasn't been a possibility for the last year with the limitations of a world-wide pandemic. But we have a couple big birthdays and a big anniversary to celebrate this year. We both turn 60 and we'll be married 40 years in 2021. So we were hoping to go somewhere special.

When we looked at our schedule this summer, we wanted to be at our granddaughter's third birthday in May in Oklahoma. We also wanted to be at a nephew's wedding in Amarillo, Texas, in June. But what would we do during the month in between? 

How about a vacation?!? We are now fully vaccinated, and we have those flight credits to use. But where could we go?

How about ALASKA!!! We've been there on a cruise, but we haven't gotten to explore the interior of this big state. We have always had that on our bucket list, but we really didn't want to put our motor home through the long trip to get there. 

We have talked to lots of full-time RVers that have made the trip, and Denisa has taken notes on their advice and opinions about this epic journey. So we got out all those scraps of paper with their travel tips, and started doing earnest trip research on-line.

We have decided to fly to Anchorage, and start our exploration from there. We're in the early planning stages, but things are beginning to take shape. Back when she was planning big trips before we were retired, Denisa would spend 6-9 months planning a vacation like this. It's a good thing we aren't working any more, because we will need lots of hours to get the details worked out in such a short time. 

So stay tuned, because we're going on vacation. We'll be flying to Alaska on May 21!

We would recommend a Texas State Park pass

From Tyler, Texas, we made the 63-mile drive to yet another Texas State Park. This is our last one of the season, and our park pass is well worn. We signed up for another two night stay (so we got the second night at half-price) and settled into Daingerfield State Park in the northeast corner of the state.

Even in the middle of the week, there weren't many camp sites open for multiple days that would fit our rig. We ended up staying in the less popular Mountain View Campground. Having fewer camp sites available makes choosing a site during the on-line registration process much faster. But it also illustrates that camping is more popular than ever here in Texas. We were lucky to get such a nice, reasonably level spot here where the tall pines make our motor home look tiny.

It was a cool morning when we set out on a hike on this 3.6-mile trip around the lake. We started in the trees on the Mountain View Trail, and then headed downhill to the Rustling Leaves Trail.

Shortly after we got started, we got a report of a copperhead snake that was on the trail ahead. The four children in the group that made the report were quick to tell us that Mom almost stepped on it. This cool morning it wasn't moving very fast. Before the parents could get the children's stories shut down, they also reported that Dad had killed the venomous snake. It might be strange that we were a little disappointed that we wouldn't see the copperhead this morning.

But it wasn't long before we did have our first snake sighting. We found a bright lime-green snake on the trail.

Because it was cool, this little guy was barely moving. He didn't mind a close-up picture, and we were glad to see from the shape of the head and the round eyes that this was not a dangerous snake. 

We were especially glad because we would see three more of those little lime-green snakes scattered on the trail during our hike today.

About half-way through our hike, the trail took us close to the water of Little Pine Lake. Wouldn't you know it, we looked down in the water at our feet and saw another snake! 

Scaly hiking companions don't usually bother us, but one thing that really scares us is poison ivy. We found that staying away from this nuisance can be very difficult in the Texas state parks we have seen this spring. It's a banner year for growing this itchy plant with its mitten-like leaves. We found it growing in healthy clumps, and even crawling up tree trunks. We try to stay away from these "leaves of three," but it is tough around here. This is our fourth state park in our recent travels that has done a recent controlled burn, so they are trying to control this pesky plant.

We did find cuter, less itchy park residents when we circled near the covid-closed nature center on our loop trail. The swallows are preparing their nests for a new family this spring. This multi-colored mud nest looks like this mother collected building materials from several different locations.

Our two days went quickly, and we didn't even put our boat in the lake here at Daingerfield State Park. We wonder if that had anything to do with all those snake sightings on our trip around the lake?

On our last morning at the park, a constant rain kept us in the motor home. It was a soggy view out our wind shield. Even though all the camping sites had been reserved, obviously some people changed their mind about coming when they saw the rainy forecast.

We hoped the rain would quit by check-out time, but it did not. Mark's raincoat was buried in the back of the pickup. To find it meant opening the back, and exposing everything to the rain. So instead, he suited up in a trash bag to dump the tanks and unhook the utilities.

It was still raining when we hooked up the pickup and pulled out of our camp site. Even with his make-shift raincoat, Mark was soaked. He had to change to dry clothes before we made our drive today. Before he drives the motor home to a new location, Mark always checks out the roads on google maps, looking for low overpasses, or bridges with small weight limits. He'll have his chosen path running on the map of his cell phone, as well as the Garmin big-rig GPS on the dash of the motor home. At the same time, Denisa has a paper map on her lap "just in case." She keeps all the paper maps, as we are often circling back through the area. About five years ago, she started using highlighters to mark our path on those state maps. The Texas map is well worn, and has many routes highlighted on it. She learned to use a different colored highlighter for each moving day, so it shows how far we usually drive at one time.

Texas is a big state! This trip from the southern tip through east Texas took us to 9 different campgrounds over 24 days of travel. Of those campgrounds, three were Texas state parks, so we got our money out of those second half-price camping nights! We also stopped at four other neighboring state parks this spring, and our Texas state park pass was good for free entry into those places as well. So we would definitely recommend the $70 purchase of a Texas state park pass for anyone traversing the length of this very big state.