Ah, spacious Arkansas!

False Mulberry or Beautyberry

Main destination on the first leg of our trip to do some crystal mining. Found great HipCamp in Mulberry, Arkansas - way out in the boonies with nothing but trees and Mother Nature for as far as our eyes could see.

The space was hosted by a kind soul, Grant, who has a house here. And being that he lives there alone, thought he would open it up for campers to get an influx of company. He has a lovely house with a hot tub on the deck and a nice outdoor shower. His three dogs (actually one of them was the neighbor's dog who actually looked a lot like Gertie) greeted us up on our arrival and we're very fun for Gertie to play with.

We got there earlier in the day as we wanted to air out all of our camp supplies and tent from the night before when it rained in Kentucky at my brother Adam's place. It was sunny and about 75 degrees, which made it a perfect time to do this. As evening fell we wrapped up what was drying and got the FireBowl going and put up some solar lights. I even got out my guitar and played a few songs.

😀💗✌🎸🎵🔥★

It did get quite chilly... down to about 35 degrees, but we were toasty warm in our tent with our down comforter and each other. We slept for the first time without the rain fly on our tent and I awoke in the middle of the night with a full moon staring me right in the face through the top of her tent. But before we fell asleep we watched a couple of episodes of our new binge-worthy series, Designated Survivor, with Kiefer Sutherland. After that and before we closed our eyes to sleep, we had a wonderful view of a super bright sky with stars galore! After all the hard work we do and my questioning whether it is all worth it or not, this definitely reassured me that it IS!

The morning found us with plenty of condensation on everything almost the point where it looked like it had rained. Nevertheless, we dried stuff off and broke camp, but not before having a lovely breakfast of whole grain cooked cereal with brown sugar and plenty of fresh ground coffee brewed.

We then set out for the Twin Creeks Crystal Mine over in Mount Ida. This was about a 2 hour drive, which I underestimated the amount of time that it was going to take, but we did get in a couple of hours of digging around for crystals. The ones that we did find were very clear and well shaped. I found a bunch of them that were twin crystals, (two, formed side by side) which reminded me of Bernie and myself. The road into the place was very steep and full of potholes and rivets that made it extremely difficult to drive... especially with our sensitive bike rack. As you may remember from earlier blog posts we have been having issues with it. But we managed to get in and out without incident, and found a nice place nearby to spend the night at a hotel. This was a strategic move as we were covered with dirt and very tired and it was late in the day.

The place we found was in Memphis which we drove to from Arkansas and was right in downtown at the Sheraton. Very nice spacious from very comfortable, and we had a great night sleep. In the morning we set off for New Mexico! We will be updating the blog soon with stuff from NM

Thank you for reading, and be sure to check out the photos below. And we'll catch up with you soon.

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