From July 10…..
After the zoo we headed over to the Clinton Presidential Library/Museum. We love us a good presidential museum – we’ve been to Eisenhower (Kansas) and also the elder Bush (Texas) (which somehow we never blogged about! grrr!) One of my goals is to visit all of them because it’s way more interesting than normal history stuff and they’re full of interesting back story on the presidents and lots of cool artifcats !
Once the girls got soaked in the fountain and we passed security we were free to see all the old relics from the Clinton years – and of course Lilli was extra interested in the former First Lady. She currently thinks Hillary wants to be president so she can live in the White House again because of the bowling alley and all the nice amenities.
It was several floors of Bill’s daily schedules, notes, all kinds of books, relics from the years and lots of information on his life and background.
It was full of natural light with a great view of downtown Little Rock and lots of things for little monkeys to swing around on and generally be disruptive.
They also had a special (traveling) exhibit about the Olympics with lots of old medals, outfits and things from many years of Olympic competition.
Lilli was especially excited for the gymnastics leotards, medals and other Team USA Gymnastics stuff!
A massive storm was moving in as we wrapped up. We’d wanted to go to a fun downtown park but decided it didn’t look so good for that.
We headed to a free indoor nature center downtown instead just as the rain started. It had all kinds of native animals and lots of tourists were taking shelter there. This was a huge storm with tons of lightning and even a few periods of hail, so we were glad for the dry spot to play in. The guides gave the girls scavenger hunts and they had to walk around finding all the animals on their bingo card for a prize.
We were there over an hour until we just couldn’t look at the same things one more time. It was still raining pretty hard but the worst of the storm had moved on.
From there we kept heading west to Arkadelphia for our stop for the night. We ended up being in a hotel with another baseball team who was hogging the indoor pool. We asked the front desk clerk for fun things to do and he told us about a nearby lake with a great beach. That was probably the best tip we got on the entire trip……
We pretty much had the beach to ourselves, very shallow water, and the girls loved every second of getting to play and run and splash.
We stayed until sunset letting them stack rocks, play in the sand and just explore while we sat on the beach and relaxed. We were just starting to be in the hills of Arkansas so it was such a pretty stop to make.
Once it started getting dark we headed back to our hotel, ordered Mexican takeout, and had an in room fiesta before getting some shut eye before our next day of exploring Arkansas! I think this lake could very well be why Arkansas is called the Natural State!
