Agile Trekker: Hot Springs National Park, Hot Springs, Arkansas

Date	Distance	Time	Elevation Gain	Average Moving Time	Year to Date Miles
4/4/2023	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	154.6

Parking:

Arlington Resort & Spa, Hot Springs

Map:

Directions:

Not a hiking day. I noticed that Hot Springs, Arkansas has a national park, so we made it a point to stay in the town and visit. We arrived later than we expected. Charging your car in rural locations was a bit more challenging than it is along the east coast corridor. We ended up not taking a very efficient route to Hot Springs, as we wanted to make sure we didn't run too low on range. We got to Hot Springs around dinner time. We stayed at a hotel which was way more expensive than we would normally do. I think we chose it because it advertised as allowing dogs & having an on-site ev charger, which we needed. Parking was a little challenging too. We were offered valet parking for $28. Um nope. Or we could self-park at the hotel parking garage down the road for $21. Or walk further away for free parking. We didn't pack efficiently. Ugh. We opted for the $21 self-parking, which is where the "free" ev chargers were. Then found 2 of the chargers were broken (no power). It turns out there were other ev chargers in the town that we didn't know about, that we could have used.

The hotel is very convenient to the national park - which is across the street. That being said, I would have preferred to stay somewhere else. The hotel is historic but is rather run down. It must have been beautiful inside at its heyday, but now just looks kind of sad with peeling paint, musty smelling air, etc. We also paid an arm & a leg to stay there. A sit-down breakfast buffet is included in the price of the room, but we don't eat indoors, so that didn't help us. Our hotel came with a mini-refrigerator, but not a microwave. We travel with oatmeal to eat for breakfast, but with no microwave, that meant no breakfast.

We quickly dropped off our things and headed out for a walk in the park. It was after 5pm, so the visitor center was already closed. The park is small, so we at least could walk along the promenade and then down the main street to see the bath houses. The hot springs are really neat. The park is very small, so maybe a day or two in town would be sufficient for a visit. We wished we had arrived earlier so that we could have gone inside the bath houses (one is still operational).