A civics lesson

Tallahassee is the capital of Florida and therefore where its state laws are made.  We dropped by to gain insights into the democratic process.

At the time we visited - a week and a half after the shooting at the Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida - the legislature was having a gun control debate.  Outside the conference room down the hall a huge number of protesters, mostly high school students, were assembled, watching the discussion on closed-circuit television.  All the audience seats in the debate room were taken, so we were unable to observe the action directly.  It's unclear whether this tragedy will result in real changes to the gun laws, but the national climate does feel different this time.

We wandered the hallways of power and were surprised to find that the offices of the Republican senators and representatives (the majority) were on one floor and the Democrats on a different floor.  The Democratic floor had a bunch of signs welcoming the demonstrators; the Republicans did not.

When we returned to the capitol building the next day, the Army National Guard was out in force.  Nancy was apprehensive that they were there to quell a gun control demonstration, but it turned out to be National Guard Day, where they showed all their toys - tanks, trucks, guns, mortars, and drones.   They served hot dogs to us all, and a National Guard band performed patriotic songs.

At one point we saw something there among the men in uniforms and instruments of war that made me think I had been transported back to California.

We attended a morning session of the Florida Senate.  Laws were introduced one after the other, there was no debate about or opposition to any of them, and they were passed unanimously.  More likely to put you to sleep than to stir your soul.  Perhaps we simply caught them on a boring day.

We've lived in California for more than forty years, and we went to that state capital exactly one time.  This is an example of travel pushing you to explore your surroundings more thoroughly on the road than at home.

Goodbye, Santa Rosa Beach.

In order to keep the appointment for a followup vet visit for Tammy Faye, we stayed a couple of extra days in Santa Rosa Beach.  That allowed us to attend another Friday night concert in the tack room of the stables beside our RV park.  This time there were three singer/musicians on stage, all of whom are songwriting veterans of the Nashville music scene.  The couple on the left would perform two or three numbers, then the guy on the right would do one.  The bearded fellow was an excellent guitarist and he and his wife had sweet country voices.  The good old boy on the right had one of those Marlboro whiskey bass voices but unfortunately was a better songwriter than singer.

Each song was preceded by a story of living and trying to make it in Nashville.  For example, the guy on the right told of being broken by his divorce some years back and going to a therapist, who told him on leaving the session to listen for support to a particular Rascal Flatts song - "I'm moving on".  He said, "Hey, I wrote that song!" and took it as a sign that maybe he was meant to be where he was.  That story might even be true.  Kind of a unique evening.

On the suggestions of some locals we did further exploration of the beaches along Highway 30A.  Among those beyond Seaside Beach were Rosemary Beach and Panama City Beach, both of which had wonderful European-style village architecture, and it was fun wandering those streets.

Incidentally, their real estate was even more expensive than Seaside's.  The sand beaches there were incredibly beautiful but somewhat restricted in public access.  One negative is that the traffic was kind of horrible, and you can imagine how much worse it will be in the summer.  For us the clear area winner in terms of where we'd prefer to live is Santa Rosa Beach, where our RV park is located, because it's somewhat off the beaten track and has a great feel to it, yet homes are considerably cheaper there.

But if you want truly cheap housing, you need to move further away from the gulf.  A nice couple originally from Baton Rouge, Louisiana will be staying in this Santa Rosa Beach RV park for seven months while their home is being built in the Hammock Bay housing development, about 15 miles away.  We decided to drive over and check out their new home site.  The landscaping and open spaces in this 3000-acre development were awfully nice, and there was a commons area which included a clubhouse, restaurant, tennis courts, and multiple swimming pools.  Amazingly, the home prices there begin "in the hundreds".  We toured a couple of open houses, and one of them - probably listed at about $400,000 - a 3000 square foot four or five bedroom floor plan - was impressive, with a good open design and quality decorative touches.

Our next stop will be Tallahassee, the capital of Florida.  We plan to attend meetings of the legislature in hopes that there will be heated discussions dealing with the recent school-shooting tragedy.  We'll also keep our eyes open for demonstrators in the streets.  Perhaps a chance to observe history in the making.

Under the knife

On Tuesday our sweet Tammy Faye, who we suspect is of Cocker Spaniel and Poodle ancestry, underwent oral surgery.  The doggie dentist put her under anesthesia, extracted several rotten teeth, and incidentally took the opportunity to remove a couple of skin cysts.  After waking up, Tammy Faye was groggy but soon back to her usual less than energetic self.  Her appetite, which had been diminished prior to surgery, regained its old enthusiasm.  She's doing great and has resumed her customary duties, which consist mainly of being a beloved and valued member of the Wilson family.

We drove along Highway 30A and explored the beach towns to the east of Destin and Santa Rosa Beach.  The most impressive was Seaside, with its lovely architecture - much like Santa Rosa Beach - and a lineup of cute food trucks on the main road.  It appeared to be both more upscale and more crowded than Santa Rosa Beach.  Unfortunately, when we looked at a display of available homes in the town, real estate prices appeared to be right up there with the Santa Cruz area.

This area has some of the most beautiful beaches we've ever seen.  The water is warm, which of course it isn't even in Southern California, and doesn't stink, as Nancy remembers it often does at the New Jersey shore of her childhood. 

We dropped into a real estate office in Santa Rosa Beach and found that there aren't a lot of homes listed currently, and the prices are very high anywhere near the gulf beaches.  Waterside houses are less expensive on the bay just inland, but there you have to deal with swarms of mosquitoes in the summer months.  The weather is pretty much perfect at this time of the year, but it does get very hot and muggy in the summer.

Our conclusion is that this is a fine area and has a lot to recommend it, but at this point it's hard to imagine that Nancy and I would end up moving here. 

Santa Rosa Beach, Florida

A nice lady in New Orleans had recommended a particularly beautiful campground in the beach town of Destin, Florida, and that's where we planned to go next.  Now since winter is not a popular time for family RV travel, we had gotten into the habit of picking out a town's campground on the day we were planning to arrive, calling, and finding the camp operator pleased to accept us on short notice.  But when we phoned the recommended camp, it was booked solid for the next couple of weeks.  In fact, every Destin campground we called was full.  Uh-oh.  Finally I was able to locate an opening in an adjacent town - Santa Rosa Beach - 18 miles from Destin - at something called Arnett's Gulfside Trail Rides, Stables, and Campground.

This turned out to be an interesting place.  It is about a mile from the beach, and that partially explains why space was available.  The campground is not the primary business, and the RV sites are unpaved and a bit sloppy - but we like it here a lot.

Arnett's is sort of a dude ranch.  Lots of good-looking horses in the stables and fields, and a friendly donkey wandering around free.

The night we arrived, they had a concert in a public space that also served as a church on Sunday.  We attended the concert (but skipped the church service).  The band was bluegrass and country, and the featured singer kind of a local celebrity.

When we drove through Destin on the way to our campground, it appeared to be a very touristy beach town, lots of expensive hotels and condos but lacking charm, at least from our vantage point.  The downtown of Santa Rosa Beach, on the other hand, is pretty and appeals to us much more than Destin.  Light traffic, nice shops, and we love the default home style of the town - pastel colors with white trim, balconies with white handrails, and light-colored metal roofs.  The photo below gives you an idea of the local architecture.  With all the palm trees, it looks like what you'd expect to find in Key West or the Caribbean.  Cheerful, casual, fun, and friendly.  We might like living here.

Biloxi

Our RV park in Biloxi, Mississippi is just across Beach Boulevard from the waters of the Gulf Coast, and it's beautiful.  Pristine white sand beaches.  Lovely mansions lining Beach Street.  The weather is nice and warm.

One of the problems associated with a lifestyle of moving from place to place is that whenever you need to have a service performed, you are flying blind.  That is, the auto mechanic and the dog groomer and the primary care doctor you've used for years are 2000 miles away and aren't interested in doing house calls under those circumstances.

I desperately needed a haircut.  Nancy found a well-reviewed barber in a shopping mall.  When I walked in, a black barber was cutting a black man's hair.  Two other black guys appeared to be awaiting their turns.  I said hello.  No one responded.  Not a peep.  I was beginning to think I wasn't valued as a potential customer.  I left, my dignity only slightly bruised.

The internet yielded another option - Joe's Barber Shop.  A white guy was cutting a white man's hair.  Two white guys appeared to be awaiting their turns.  But there was another barber whose chair was empty, so I felt lucky that I didn't have to wait.  Unfortunately, the young man may have been a trainee, and he gave me a bad, uneven cut.  Overall it was an improvement, though.  I no longer looked like an old homeless person, just a little odd.  (No photos available.)

We've tried to hit as many presidential libraries as possible on our trip, so we took the opportunity to visit one in Biloxi.  And this library was a little different.  It was the Jefferson Davis Presidential Library.  You don't remember President Davis?  He was the one and only president of the Confederate States of America during the Civil War.  The library is on the grounds of Beauvoir, the last home of Davis, where he lived after two years' imprisonment for his role in the attempted secession.  Pictured below are Bouvoir and then the funeral carriage in which his body was borne in supposedly the largest funeral ever in New Orleans.

Biloxi is still dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina all these years later.  The storm surge reached 25 feet and damaged every building near the beach to one extent or another.  Many homes were torn down, and most of the new houses are built on pilings that raise them well above ground.

Our last evening in Biloxi we bought three pounds of cooked crawfish in their shells and feasted on them in our motorhome.  Our one restaurant experience in Biloxi - at Half Shell Oysters - was wonderful.  We expect to eat well in our time on the Gulf Coast.

Mississippi Blues

Looking for an interim stop between Hot Springs, Arkansas, and Biloxi, Mississippi, I found Cleveland, Mississippi in approximately the right location and googled it.  Happily, it was the Smithsonian's 2017 #2 best small town to visit and boasted a Grammy Museum, so it seemed a fine choice.  RV parks in that area were hard to find, though.  The nearest - Willy's Last Resort - was in the town of Indianola, a half hour from Cleveland.  Nancy called Willy, who said that there were only four RV sites there, with nobody around, but to hook up our motorhome, and he would drop by.  It turned out to be a plain small town parking lot with four marked spaces, but each site had the necessary hookups.  And only a block away was the B.B. King Museum!

We drove to Cleveland and looked around, and the downtown district was nice enough, but in general Cleveland was just an average Mississippi town.  Then we toured the Grammy Museum, which was wonderful.  A large theater with fabulous sound played a loop of snippets of hundreds of performances over the years at the Grammy awards show.  And a smaller theater showed Michael Jackson videos.  Of course his vocals were magical, in my opinion, and some of the visuals, especially the ones directed by John Landis, were absolutely brilliant.  Dresses and costumes worn by iconic singers at the Grammys and a number of instruments of famous musicians were displayed.  Among the interactive features were various instruments a museum-goer could play.

I wondered why in the world Cleveland, Mississippi had been selected to house this large, state-of-the-art Grammy museum.  I suspect that it was largely because this part of Mississippi is considered to be the birthplace of delta blues.  Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, B.B. King, John Lee Hooker (whose music was featured in a display there), and others were born here and were pioneers of this raw, emotional musical style.  Another factor is that Mississippi has been the birthplace of an impressive number of other famous singers and musicians.  Elvis Pressley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Faith Hill, Bo Diddley, and many others started life here.

We spent a couple of hours in the Grammy Museum, and it was a great experience.  Unfortunately, we didn't see a single other person during our visit.  I hope that was an aberration.

Back in Indianola, we walked from our RV site to the B.B. King Museum, another beautifully designed and executed display of memorabilia.  B.B. was born nearby into a dirt-poor sharecropper family back in 1925, when segregation was at its ugliest.  He became an international star who lived most of his life doing gigs on the road until his death in 2015.  He's buried in a little park beside the museum.

Nancy and I saw B.B. twenty years ago at the Great American Music Theater in San Francisco.  Even more than his singing, that guitar vibrato was immediately identifiable as being uniquely his.  Nobody else has ever sounded like that.

It's weird to think about the fact that I grew up in Tallulah, Lousiana, just 100 miles from Indianola and Cleveland.  I was an ignorant white kid who had no idea that an important musical form was invented and was being developed practically next door, just across the Mississippi River.

Two amazing museums dedicated to music twenty-five miles apart in hardscrabble Mississippi.  Surprising, and we loved them both.  By the way, Willy, the RV park owner, never came by, and we left without ever paying.  Heck of a way to run a business.  (We'll send him a check if he ever answers our calls or text.)

Bentonville to Hot Springs

Nancy scoured Yelp for dentists in Bentonville and selected Dr. Rinehart as the man best qualified to cure my toothache.  He pulled that pesky molar at lower right that had been on death watch for a couple of years and sent me away on heavy drugs.

After an evening of recuperation we visited the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which is an impressive architectural achievement in a beautiful natural setting.  Some of the galleries were closed for updating, but there were still plenty of interesting exhibits.

One of the museum docents told us that the economic engine of Arkansas is not in its capitol, Little Rock, but in the northwestern corner of the state - especially Bentonville, the national headquarters of the Walmart juggernaut, where the unemployment rate is under 3%.  Downtown Bentonville is booming, and a new state-of-the-art cooking school has been established nearby.  He said that they consider Little Rock, which we liked, economically troubled and crime-ridden.

The museum grounds include a Frank Lloyd Wright house that had been transported from its original location in New York and reconstructed, piece by piece.

Not ones to let a pulled tooth keep us from a good meal, we ate at The Preacher's Son near the Bentonville town square.  It's a fancy restaurant in a spectacular setting - that of a restored church.  We only gave the food a B+ but it was a lovely evening.  There are lots of appealing restaurants and shops around the picturesque town square.  Interestingly, in this town dominated by the ultimate chain store - Walmart - the downtown doesn't allow chain stores (which might spoil the ambience).

The cold weather was beginning to wear on us California creampuffs, so we decided to head south, down to the Gulf Coast.  We had one more stop in Arkansas - the city of Hot Springs - which turned out to be fascinating.  There are a number of springs in the current Hot Springs downtown area naturally producing water at 143 degrees, without the sulfur stink of many other hot springs, and there have been spas there since the 19th century and earlier.  Bathhouse Row, in the Central Avenue Historic Center, consists of eight magnificent mansions, side by side, one of which - the Fordyce Bathhouse - is now a museum that lets you walk through and imagine what a bath there was like a century or so ago.  Here is its elegant Music Room.

Another of those bathhouses still offers bath experiences at $33 for the following: immersion in the hot waters, the application of hot packs, time in a steam cabinet, and a needle shower, the whole thing lasting 50 minutes or so.  Quite reasonable.  We're beginning to regret that we didn't take the opportunity.

Hot Springs has a fascinating history even aside from its bathhouses, including baseball spring training, gambling, and gangsters, including Al Capone.  In 1852 Congress designated Hot Springs as a federal reserve, and it became a national park in 1921.

So what do we make of Arkansas?  I never expected it to be among our favorites, but like Texas it was full of surprises.  Nancy thinks we should add Bentonville to our list of possible future homesites.  Friendly, intelligent people, a good food scene, pretty scenery, and low (but rising) real estate prices.

Walmart country

We liked Eureka Springs a lot, but after four days we were ready to move about fifty miles over to Bentonville, Arkansas, which has several museums we wanted to visit.  The problem on the morning of departure was that not only had our water supply pipes frozen, so had the two holding tanks.

One of those tanks - the black water tank - holds toilet waste and the other - the gray water tank - holds the water that drains from the shower and the two sinks.  Both tanks were close to full, and I had planned to empty them before we drove away.  But when I tried to pull the levers to drain them, neither side worked.  This was the morning after the 11 degree nighttime temperature, and my conclusion was that the waste liquid in each tank had frozen solid, a circumstance which I didn't anticipate might happen.  One's first concern might be that we sure don't want a limit on what we could deposit into the toilet, but the other tank - the gray water tank - also has an issue; once it is full, any additional waste water from the sinks will raise the level up over the floor of the shower.  In the past, once or twice I've been slow to drain that holding tank and ugly, cloudy, slightly tan sink water covered the shower bottom an inch deep.  Yuck.

Our circumstances were desperate.

When we arrived at our RV park in Bentonville, I propped up our small electric heater on the lip of  an exterior compartment so that it blew warm air against the two plastic holding tanks, in fervent hopes of melting the disgusting icebergs inside them.  I'm happy to report that after an hour of warming, everything worked.  I successfully drained both tanks, and we were able to resume normal activity.

Motorhome life at its best.

Bentonville was the home of Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart and Sam's Club, for much of his life.  The first variety store he owned was here, as is the current Walmart home office.  The remaining Walton family is supposedly the richest family in America, and they have funded the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, supposedly one of the best art collections in the US.  That museum was the main reason we came to Bentonville.

Sam's original five and dime store was in downtown Bentonville and remains as the entrance to the Walmart museum, which tells us how Walton revolutionized American commerce.

Bentonville also has a Native American History Museum, which contains wonderful displays of artifacts from many Indian tribes, plus the skeleton of a wooly mammoth, which may have been hunted by native Americans.  I'm the one on the left.

On a personal note, I have a toothache.  Hurts like the devil.  It's my second molar at lower right, and before we tour the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, I have to get it fixed.  I've made a dental appointment for tomorrow.

Eureka Springs

Back in 1998 Nancy and her sister Diane visited a wild animal compound in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.  Nancy fell in love with that town, so we drove up into the Ozarks in the northwestern corner of the state to take a look.

Now I have to admit that when I think of "the Ozarks", the movie Deliverance comes to mind, with its inbreeding and grinding poverty (though admittedly Deliverance was set in Georgia).  But I was offbase; the quality of the roads was fantastic, and the countryside was beautiful and looked relatively prosperous.

We noticed an incredible number of churches in this part of the country.  It became a game for us on our drive to guess how many houses of worship we'd be able to count in each town we passed, based on population.  But we didn't see any mosques or synagogues.  And our RV park in Eureka Springs was on Passion Play Road, so named because a few blocks past our park there's an enormous amphitheater in which from May to October they present a dramatic recreation of Christ's last days on Earth.  Safe to say we were in hardcore Jesus country.

Believe it or not, Eureka Springs is on the Arkansas wine trail.  We visited Keels Creek Winery and learned that most of the vinifera grapes we are familiar with don't do well in this part of Arkansas, so they plant mostly hybrids.  We experienced a tasting, which was fun but didn't impress our sophisticated California palates.

Downtown Eureka Springs is picturesque and charming, with climbing and winding streets and lots of interesting shops.  On Saturday there was a Mardi Gras parade there, which sort of made up for the fact that we missed the one in New Orleans.  We caught a lot of beads.

On Sunday we drove to Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge, the rescue compound that had prompted our visit.  The refuge takes in abused, neglected, and abandoned big cats and bears, neuters them to prevent pregnancies, and takes care of them for the rest of their natural lives.  In spite of temperatures around freezing, we took a long walking tour and saw lions, tigers, ligers (lion/tiger crosses), and others.  It's quite an impressive operation.  They do good work.

During our exploration of the area we stumbled across a jaw-dropping structure called Castle Rogue's Manor, which looked like something out of Grimm's fairy tales.  We arranged to meet its owner, Smith Treuer, for a tour.  I think we've finally found someone crazier than me.  Smith designed the structure and has been personally working on it for over twenty years.  I'm impressed by the originality of his design and by the incredible amount of woodwork inside and out.  The first structure we toured was octagonal and several stories high and contained two gorgeous bedrooms and baths.  The other large structure features a Great Hall which reminded us of scenes in Game of Thrones.  Smith rents out the place for weddings and other events.  It turns out that he also the owner of Rogue's Manor Restaurant, where we had eaten a wonderful meal the night before.  So Smith is quite a guy.  We swapped castle-building stories.

Driving home, snow flurries began and dusted our RV park.  That was Super Bowl Sunday.  Nancy's brother in Pennsylvania is a diehard Eagles fan, and since Nancy and I don't like Tom Brady, Bill Belichick, or the Patriots, we adopted the Eagles and rooted for them hard.  Nancy was too nervous to watch the game and would only come to the TV set when I let her know the Eagles had done something positive.  Well, the forces of good triumphed, the Philadelphia Eagles won, and it was a perfect end to the day ... except that the temperature fell to 11 degrees that night.  Not only did the exterior water supply freeze up, so did the onboard water tank, so no washee, no flushee.  Life outside California is a little different from what we're used to.

Jesus, could you warm things up a little bit?

Little Rock, Arkansas

Little Rock is the capitol of Arkansas and the site of one of the pivotal moments of the integration movement when federal troops escorted nine black students into Central High back in 1957.  Today it is a thoroughly modern city, and we were surprised by how much we liked it.

From our RV park we walked across a bridge to the Bill Clinton Presidential Library.  We've been to several other such libraries, and while this one was perhaps the most architecturally interesting of the ones we've seen (LBJ, Reagan, Nixon, FDR), it didn't have nearly the emotional impact of the others, perhaps because there were fewer crises during his administration, perhaps because there was no theater showing the highlights of his eight years in office.

Most cities this size have an impressive restaurant scene, and Little Rock is no exception.  When we decide that it's time to go out for dinner, we spend some time reading internet reviews and try to pick the restaurant that sounds most interesting, and for Little Rock that was Brave New Restaurant.  Good choice, Wilsons.  Inventive menu and an excellent wine list heavy on California offerings.  Our favorite course was a wild mushroom tart with two sauces.

As we were enjoying our main courses, a dude in a red jumpsuit introduced himself as Peter Brave, the owner and chef.  Nancy asked where we would find the best shrimp locally for a dish we'd be making the following night, and he went into the kitchen and brought us a dozen shrimp, in consideration of which he asked us to tip our waiter an extra five bucks.  A lovely evening.

Driving around Little Rock, you'll see any number of wonderful buildings from the past.  We especially enjoyed the Old State House Museum.

On our last night in Little Rock, the temperature dropped into the twenties.  We're almost getting used to freezing our butts off, but going through the steps for departure - stowing the water hoses, sewer hoses, and electrical cables, plus hooking up our tow vehicle - requires working without warm gloves for an extended time and is murder on the fingers.  A wise person might head south for warmer climes, but we drove north - to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, which may get even colder.