Saturday, April, 27, 2024

 

The weather was overcast and drizzly in the morning, so we packed up our campsite and left around 7:30 in the morning to avoid traffic in Memphis. We crossed the Mississippi River into Arkansas at 8:00. Because of the weather we had planned on finding somewhere to eat breakfast. The highway signs for the historic Brinkley downtown looked interesting so we pulled off the highway looking for coffee and food. The downtown had very nice signs hanging from the light poles advertising the historic downtown, unfortunately the history part seemed the most accurate as most of the buildings were boarded up, closed, or looked abandoned. We try to avoid chain restaurants when traveling but, in this case, ended up at McDonald’s as this was the only restaurant open.

In the early afternoon, after a drive down narrow switchback roads we arrived at Devil’s Den State Park. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was instrumental in building most of the infrastructure in the park. The campground is near a river and is shaded by trees. There has been quite a lot of rain lately so the hiking trail that started near our camp site was underwater.

After some hiking we had an early dinner at the park Cafe by a dam with an impressive waterfall. 

The cafe worker is a local and warned us that there were thunderstorms and severe weather forecast for the evening. We didn’t get much sleep as it POURED rain all night and there were several thunderstorms. The tent was very impressive as it did not leak at all!