At the beginning of this year, I decided that this would be the year that I finished visiting all 50 states. I had started the year with Alabama, and then put the project on pause through the summer because I refuse to go to the south in the overwhelming heat of July or August. But as it turned to fall, it was time to tackle my last three: Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana!
I have been specifically saving Louisiana for last. Once I got to my last ten or so, I looked at what I had left and picked that as the one that I was the most interested in, and the one that felt most like a celebration. And it ended up working out perfectly, because one of my friends decided to celebrate her birthday in New Orleans this November! It gave me a deadline, and so I set out to visit Arkansas and Mississippi before that weekend.
And as luck would have it, this dovetailed really well with a different travel goal that my friend Phil was working on! He has been working on going to a football game at all of the SEC stadiums, and so we decided to join forces for these penultimate states.
We flew into the Northwest Arkansas airport in Bentonville. This region of Arkansas has a lot of investment in it, because this is where Walmart is headquartered. The airport was modern and beautiful, and I was pretty impressed with Fayetteville as well.
I found Fayetteville quite charming. There were cute local cafés and restaurants, and boutique shops, and I went to the farmer’s market as well when it was running. It was a nice town.
On Saturday morning, we made our way through the University of Arkansas campus to watch the game! They were playing Auburn. The weather was not great, raining intermittently, but the game itself was good. Not a good ending, if you were an Arkansas fan, but Phil and I didn’t care about the result and the game was interesting up until the end.
The next day, we drove down to Little Rock to see a bit more of the state. The timing wasn’t ideal, unfortunately – it was during the government shutdown, so some of the things that I was interested in doing in Little Rock were closed because they’re run by the National Park Service.
It was still raining, this time much harder than it had been at the game. Phil and I walked from our hotel over to the Bill Clinton Presidential Library, which we thought would be open but apparently that is also impacted by a government shutdown. So instead we walked around the grounds for a bit and headed back to the hotel in defeat.
All in all, Fayetteville was much cooler than Little Rock, but I also don’t know that it was a fair view of Little Rock with the weather and the closures of the few tourist attractions they do have. I was impressed with Northwest Arkansas, though. Definitely worth the trip, and it put me one step closer to my goal!