We will probably never get back to Bentonville, but I would like to, especially when the Walmart campus is completed. If it ever will be

Digression: You know the old joke. “What did you think of London?” “I think it will be great when they finish it.” End of digression.

We went back to Vira’s Kitchen Friday night. I made the mistake of ordering a different fish with same sauce. Not a mistake in the taste sense, only in the variety sense. I also got a vegetable dish with the unlikely, but delicious, combination of cauliflower and green pepper. One more thing. I wondered if our waitress was from Kerala, since that was the cuisine. Turns out she was from Indonesia. Could have fooled me. Did fool me.

We drove south on I-49 from Bentonville towards Ft. Smith. The scenery on that ride is spectacular. I think this part of the western Ozarks is called the Boston Mountains. Or maybe it’s no longer the Ozarks. I don’t know.

Digression: Do you know that Bentonville was named after Thomas Hart Benton? Not the artist, but his father, the Missouri Senator who apparently was a driving force behind Arkansas statehood. End of digression.

About an hour south of Bentonville is Ft. Smith. It sits on the Arkansas-Oklahoma border which explains the prevalence of Cherokee Indian license plates.

While Bentonville is thriving, Ft. Smith looks content and funky. Because we had a goal for the day, we didn’t get out of the car, but managed to see some of the sights, like the two year old National US Marshals Museum.

Digression: I just heard that the marshals who used to fly incognito on airplanes have been reassigned to help ICE agents. I wonder how they feel about that. End of digression.

We also saw Miss Laura’s

Miss Laura’s is a restored brothel from the 1890s, the only former brothel on the National Register of Historic Properties, and a museum about the history of prostitution.

And we saw a lot of interesting wall art.

From Ft. Smith, we took Interstate-40 to Russellville, Arkansas. We ate lunch at a very informal railroad oriented restaurant called Stobie’s, where I had a turkey Reuben, and the waitress asked if I wanted Russian dressing or mustard. Say, what? It was very good with the Russian dressing, thank you.

We didn’t get a real feeling of Russellville, just skirting the central business district because we had a different agenda. Our old friends Carl and Michelle S__________ left Washington and moved to Russellville about ten years ago when Carl took a position as a pulmonologist at a local hospital. They stayed five or six years and then retired to New York. We think we found their house.

By looking for their house, we saw that Russellville had some large and nice residential areas which we never would have seen otherwise.

We left Russellville and headed south on “scenic” Route 7 about 75 miles to Hot Springs. We took this route because my cousin Jon in Hot Springs said it was so attractive. It is a very nice road, but there are few places to stop en route, it is very hilly and very curvy, and only two lanes. So, it was pretty exhausting. But nice.

We drove through the tourist area of downtown Hot Springs. Wall to wall people. Clearly, the place to be. Our hotel is away from this area (where we have been before; and I more than once), and we checked in to it, the Hampton Inn.

My cousin Jon F___ and his wife Sharon live near the hotel and we had a nice walleye dinner and conversation at a restaurant so good that we had to wait 45 minutes to get a table.

Here are Jon and Sharon:

Now many of you see Jon’s Facebook comments and have questioned our connection. The connection is strong and will remain so. No conflict in real life.

That is it for Day 9. Day 10 will be a little different than expected. My Memphis cousin is in the hospital, so dinner is off. So where we stop, nobody knows.