Dot on map becomes relaxing weekend in Hot Springs, Ark.
In 2015, shortly after I moved to Texas, I pinned a large map of the United States to a corkboard. I was planning a 17-day, 6,500-mile road trip out to California, up the coast and back to Houston through every National Park I could manage — just me, my car and my tent. It remains the best vacation I’ve ever taken. And the map, featuring a thumbtack-and-blue-yarn road map of my planned route, has held a coveted spot on my wall ever since.
It’s a great conversation starter when guests come over. But mostly it’s something to stare at idly and ponder: Where should I go next? When my fiancé, John, moved in with me in 2016, I’d catch him standing in front of it, daydreaming. We have a history of planning surprise road trips and weekend getaways for each other for birthdays and Christmases, in lieu of tangible gifts that would inevitably become clutter. And often, that corkboard map is the genesis of some of our wildest propositions.
We’ve learned to predict how many hours it would take us to reach a location, based on the distance between our thumb and pointer fingers when we plant the former on Houston and the latter on our dream destinations. And we both spend more time gazing and measuring in the month leading up to a special occasion. After trips to Louisville for the Kentucky Derby, New Orleans for a river-boat dinner cruise, Chattanooga, Tenn., to pet red pandas at the zoo and Dallas for a dog-friendly weekend, sometimes it feels like we’re running out of places to explore.
But one day last month, as John’s birthday approached, my eyes fixated on a little black dot: Hot Springs, Ark. I spread my fingers over the distance between that little town, nestled into a National Park, and ballparked it at a six- or seven-hour drive. Child’s play for our weekend excursions. Then I began Googling. Was there hiking? Yes. Breweries? Yes. A Texas Monthly top 50 barbecue joint along the route there? Yes. Perfect.
Also perfect? Hot Springs is affordable. Though we typically opt for Airbnbs, the quaint
village has a surplus of historical hotels, harkening back to the town’s glory days as a high-brow restorative retreat among the South’s upper crust. We stayed at the Arlington Hotel, an art-deco gem. Originally built in 1875, the original 120-room version of the hotel was razed in 1893 to make way for a 300-room iteration, built in the Spanish Renaissance style. When this was destroyed by fire in 1923, this current version of the hotel, which is the largest in Arkansas, was built.
The grand entrance, with its ornate lobby and dual staircases, shocked John when we checked in. He gave me his patented “Can we afford this?” look when we lined up at the counter. I smirked. As the woman paying the bill, I knew it would cost us only about $90 a night for a “historic” room. We were
handed a key — a real key — and headed upstairs to our room, where we found the paint on the walls cracking like a knocked-around eggshell.
If I had a do-over, I’d splurge on one of the standard rooms that, presumably, show their age a little less. Still, there was charm in the room’s visible wrinkles. And as a native of the Northeast, where the house I grew up in dates to the mid-19th century, I’m a sucker for creaking floorboards and walls you actually want to hear talk. Hot Springs has this in spades.
After settling in, we waltzed down the main strip of town, called Bathhouse Row for the eight turn-of-the-century bathhouses flanking Central Avenue. These bathhouses are a lasting reminder of the natural wonder that put Hot Springs on the
Perhaps Houston Chronicle writer Maggie Gordon’s eyes were bigger than her stomach when she got a chance to order at The Pancake Shop. The banana pancakes were killer. map: several natural hot springs, which were believed to have restorative properties for people who bathed in the thermal waters. Though they were originally built as tony places to see, soak and be seen, many have since been repurposed for more modern needs. Fordyce Bathhouse, for instance, is the visitor center at the national park that eases over the center of town. We checked it out on Day 2 during a meandering hike to the highest point in the park, where we climbed an observation tower for panoramic views of treetops and rolling hills.
But on our first night in town, we opted for a different form of relaxation in one of these structures. So we headed to Superior Bathhouse Brewery, which claims to be the first craft brewery in a U.S. National Park, as well as the first in the world to use thermal spring water as a central ingredient in its brewing process. We considered the intense “Beer Bath” flight, which offers samples of each of the brewery’s 18 beers for $30, but decided that we’d like to wake up functional enough for a hike the following morning. We stuck to four-beer flights before finding a restaurant with televisions to watch the Astros in the ALCS.
By Saturday, we’d completely adjusted to the town’s calm demeanor. A 40-minute wait on the sidewalk for a table at the much-buzzed-about Pancake Shop? No big deal. Hard-to-find trail blazes along the route to Hot Springs Mountain Trail and the observation tower? Merely an opportunity to wander in the woods a bit.
We meandered through trails and along the sidewalks of the town, poking our heads into quaint shops and sniffing handmade soaps to take home as souvenirs and gifts. And by the time I’d finished my massage in the Arlington’s spa Sunday morning (when in Rome, right?), I was a true believer in the town’s reputation as an oasis of calm and healing.
It makes me wonder: What slices of paradise will my miracle map bring me next?