A State at a Time: Arkansas

Millwood State Park
Tuesday, 3, Wednesday, 4 and Thursday, 5 March 2020

I'd intended to leave on Thursday but found myself on Wednesday afternoon still changing my mind every 15 minutes about which route I wanted to take when I left here. This didn't seem like a good way to begin several weeks of travel, so I extended my stay one more night.

Travel parameters
I went all last month without getting around to having Lily's claws clipped, so that's at the top of my priority list. I've always gone to a Banfield at Petsmart, but there are only 2 in the entire state, and one of those is closed Sat - Mon, guaranteeing that the other will be busy those days. And since those 2 are both in the Little Rock area, several hours from here (at my rate of driving), I had to consider logistics. I of course want to visit Little Rock anyway, since it's the state capital, but I hadn't planned to shove that visit up to this week.

Then I discovered the main choice of campgrounds in that area was between either several Corps of Engineers campgrounds or a KOA (huge difference in price and other amenities). And then there were all the things I'd intended to stop and see on the way that I'd have to bypass so as to keep an early vet appointment. It all got to be just too much for my little pea brain, and that's when I called the state park office to tack on an extra day.

After I got that pressure relieved, I realized almost anybody could clip her claws and that there were likely several vets in the Texarkana area too, not to mention other communities around here. Lots of people have pets, after all. And sure enough, in a quick online search I found 2 in Texarkana (AR), both of which I'd noticed when I was in town but forgotten about. I called one of them and got in easily for a 10:30 appointment on Friday. Perfect. (I think they've done studies that show too much pressure can lead to underperforming brains. Mine certainly does.)

That left me to consider campgrounds and sights and traveling routes more in this vicinity, helped along by having an extra day to consider all that.

My time
I spent Tuesday and Wednesday putting clean sheets on my bed and taking a shower and washing several days' worth of dishes and finishing up my Louisiana posts and writing the post for March 1st, and of course walking the dogs.

Also on Wednesday I went over the tourist information I'd picked up a couple of days before. I found I had both too much and too little information - I have too many of the combo booklets showing things across the whole state (hard to coordinate between them all) and too few of the pamphlets about specific sights to visit, meaning I had to spend more time online.

Once I was smart enough to give myself an extra day, I spent Thursday finishing up all the things I hadn't quite had time to get to. Got the blog posts caught up (for a change) and the cabin cleaned up and the bathroom cleaned, went for long walks with the dogs when the sun came out (another welcome change), and planned the driving route for Friday. I was lucky that Thursday was a beautiful sunny day, so we could open the windows and get some fresh air inside.

Local birds
Maybe it's the lake this campground is on, or its proximity to the Red River, or it not being all that far to the Gulf of Mexico (in far southwestern Arkansas), but there are a lot of birds in this campground.

Early one morning I saw a White Pelican swimming around in the water nearby. There's a flock of Canada Geese that seems to be resident here - the park has signs asking folks to not feed them. I've been seeing Red-headed Woodpeckers since we first arrived in the campground.

Common Goldeneye

I saw what I'm pretty sure were several Common Goldeneyes. I didn't see them closely enough to see the spot on their faces, but I used to see them constantly in Alaska and I really think that's what they were. The bird book says they show up in Arkansas in the winter, so there you go.

kid with croppie

At another time I saw a pair of Buffleheads. I guess all these duckies really like this nice lake with all its fish (well-known for largemouth bass and croppies. (The state park's literature calls them "crappies" but the local fishermen call them "croppies." Nicer sounding name for sure.)

I've also seen lots of Juncos and a pair of Bluebirds and a large flock of Red-winged Blackbirds and several Crows and a large flock of some kind of little warbler or something - "miscellaneous brown bird" I used to call them; "miscellaneous bush bird" my husband used to call them. Though what I saw weren't so much brown as a sort of olive color. So with all of these critters, it can get a little noisy around here.

Camping here
The birds are noisy but the other campers aren't. In fact, there've been very few others here. I had next door neighbors for a couple of nights, but they were generally quiet, even when they had friends out to visit. This couple and their small dog were camping out of their small pickup truck with a camper shell covering the bed - it's just the cover without any camper stuff inside. Except these folks had lots of stuff inside that they took out at night to make room for their mattress (and hoped it didn't rain, I guess). They looked middle-aged and were towing a little fishing skiff and I'd have thought they'd be ready for more comfortable living conditions. But I guess they were tough. Nice folks though.

Besides them there's a couple with 2 medium-sized dogs that they let out several times a day to run around without leashes for a while, and a large Class A RV that I think has 3 single men living inside who seem to leave for work every day, and another single man who parked his trailer and stayed one night, then left the trailer and hasn't come back.

In other words, it's been very quiet here with little dog competition, until Thursday afternoon. Suddenly, 4 more campers came in, one of them with 2 large Labs. It's a good thing we're planning to leave on Friday, because it'd be hard to dodge them in a small campground like this one.

I know there'll be dogs anywhere we go, and I know we're moving into camping season as the weather gets better, but it's been so pleasant here for so many days that I got spoiled. Oh well.

This little channel runs into Millwood Lake in the distance, beyond the marina that's at the head of the channel. A lot of campsites are on the right, most just out of the photo, though some are in it but not occupied. My RV is immediately to my left, so this is what I see out of my dining room window - a very pleasant view. For some reason, none of the Canada Geese are in this photo but I could sure hear them when I was taking it. It's a nice little campground, probably quite lush when the oaks and gum trees all leaf out in a couple more months.

Oddly, I saw only 1 squirrel the whole time we stayed at this park. I'd have thought there'd be enough food to support quite a few and couldn't figure out why they weren't there.

They warned me at the Visitor Center that I'd likely run into a lot of competition at campgrounds this month because it's Spring Break time. They said it's not just Spring Break in Arkansas, but also in all the surrounding states at various times throughout the month of March, and lots of folks will be coming to Arkansas to spend the week in the state parks. It's good to be forewarned, though I'm not sure it'll make me forearmed. I guess I've been lucky so far.

That may be partly due to the weather. It absolutely poured rain for much of Wednesday, making outdoor activities uncomfortable. (That's likely why my neighbors left Wednesday morning, because they've got nowhere to go when it rains but the little space in their small pickup bed.) And we had a fair amount of thunder now and then, upsetting Gracie of course. I'd heard that Arkansas has as many as 60 days a year of thunderstorms, and this was one of them.

The campground is stretched out along State Route 32, that crosses the dam creating Millwood Lake, and runs between the small towns of Saratoga and Ashdown. I'd already seen (and smelled) that Ashdown has a paper mill, so it wasn't a surprised to see multiple logging trucks rumbling along the road toward Ashdown.

About quarter to 10 Wednesday night, Dexter woke me up woofing at something outside. Well, it could have been deer or the leash-free dogs or someone else could have come in after I closed the curtains. But he kept it up, and then he started acting like he really wanted to go outside. I of course assumed it was because of whatever critter was outside and refused. But I doubt if he slept all night long. He kept sitting near the door and pacing around the cabin and whenever I'd move he'd make a noise so I'd know he still wanted out. And I gradually realized he might need to pee or something, but I usually keep to the schedule. And then he'd torpedo his chances of getting me to change my mind by occasionally getting under the front curtain (to look outside) and woofing again. Then early this morning he vomited, which he doesn't often do. And then he took to sitting in the stairwell by the door, so I finally gave in. I'd waited until about 45 minutes before sunrise so it wasn't pitch-black outside, and I'd told the dogs it was just a short walk, so they could relieve themselves.

Sure enough, we hadn't gotten very far from the RV before Dexter pooped. A lot. And then he peed a lot. So while I still believe there was some critter outside that he wanted to see, I also believe he was in physical distress too. I hated to do it to him but was absolutely terrified of being dragged through mud puddles when the dogs took off after a deer or something and maybe losing them altogether, as has happened at other campgrounds. So neither of us got much sleep that night and I was glad I'd extended my stay here.

Flowers
My time here has been made more pleasurable because of the flowers. Little ones, some of them tiny, and all very fresh and spring-like.

like violets with those little beard marks

Despite looking so delicate, they're mostly pretty tough, I think, because both dogs rolled on some of them and it didn't seem to hurt them (the flowers). I guess you'd need to be tough to live outdoors all the time.