Arkansas. Yes we really went there, and loved it.

Dubbed “The Natural State” for its large number of parks, lakes and rivers our journey driving through Arkansas felt like a mix of driving through the natural beauty promised by their travel guide and a perpetual flea market scattered with trailer parks and junk. While there was plenty of gorgeous vistas and forest to drive through…that was only 10% of the experience with the rest being 2 lane highways that were surrounded on two sides by trailer parks, run down houses, small one stoplight towns. Now I need to remind you that for this trip we were traveling with three little boys, so they loved looking out the windows and having “fun” things to see.

Arkansas has over 50 different state parks and what brought us on this journey that was 7 hours south of Kansas City, was the attraction of letting the boys spend hours digging in the Crater of Diamonds State Park. Kids (and adults) can look for diamonds buried (along with other fun rocks) in a 37-acre dirt field. Now there hadn’t been much rain, so the field was particularly hard to dig in, which frustrated to boys and they ended up tuckering out after about 3 hours of fun. Now we had just driven 7 hours to get here and had two nights of hotel reservations…so what in the world were we to do now?

Well given there are no real hotels around the Diamond State Park, we stayed in Hope Arkansas – 45 mins

away. Now little did we know that Hope is the place where President Bill Clinton was born and lived while he was young. Besides this attraction, there wasn’t much to see or do…with the exception of this small town containing an abundance of Pokemon Go Pokestops. We did encounter a fantastic Burger joint – Tailgaters Burgers which was delicious. Given there wasn’t much more to see or do in Hope, off we went again to our next destination - 45 minutes away - to the DeGray Lake State Park.

DeGray Lake State Park is one of the region’s five Diamond Lakes known for their crystal clear waters. What we loved about DeGray was that it had a ton of activities for the kids including horseback riding, boat rides, kayaks to rent and plenty of other amenities. The park also had the DeGray Lake Resort State Park Lodge that was a 96-room lodge right on the lake.

Even though the weather report had said hot and sunny, we were at the beach for about 20 mins before a torrential downpour hit us causing everyone to flee. We hunkered down in the car with a movie for about 45 mins before we gave in and headed out on our next adventure- of course 45 mins away in Hot Springs. But this next stop definitely had a silver lining as we encountered the MidAmerica Science Museum which was one of the best children’s museums we have ever been to (and again things to our science city membership in Kansas City we were able to get in for free). The MidAmerica Science Museum was a super-cool hands-on science museum and won the 2016 National Media for Museum and Library Sciences (only 10 people won). The museum just completed a $7.8m renovation and this place had great outdoor space along with over 100 hands on exhibits. Our boys had a blast and loved visiting this kids museum.

Now as we were walking back to the car the weather had cleared up and it was gorgeous out. So given we were about 90 mins from our hotel…and we had to drive past the lake again on our way home, we ended up stopping by DeGray Lake to finally get the “lake time” in that we had been promising the boys. The water was warm, the sand was soft and the fish and wildlife were abundant. We are so happy we returned as this really was one of the highlights of our trip. Our only disappointment was that all the activities and boat cruises were already full. After playing for a couple of hours we made our way over to the Lodge to check it out and ended up eating at their Shoreline Restaurant. Now this restaurant could be a total cash cow given the floor the ceiling windows…but it is a government run entity…so just have to keep that in mind…but nonetheless, the food was great and the views were spectacular.

Now given we still had 4 days to have fun during our vacation…and that it was raining everywhere north of us, we decided to hop in the car and head west to Dallas.