Monday May 30, 2016 Little Rock, AR

It was a brighter gray this morning. We had a couple of serious thunder and lightning storms pass through the night and early morning,  It was muddy out, but I didn't get rained on while unhooking the utilities and hooking up the Jeep.  We were on I-30 headed east by a quarter past 9. Drinking our coffee as we drove.


Before noon we pulled into Lowe's in Mount Pleasant, TX.  We parked at a far corner of the lot.  Shortly after we parked, Gerri's egger friend, Sandy Kridler and her husband, Keith,  arrived.  Gerri had made arrangements to meet them for lunch.  We went to a very nice Italian restaurant that was nearby, Lougi's.  http://www.luigisitaliancafe.us/















After lunch we were given a short tour of the town.  The old downtown, circa 1900, is typical of many small American cities we have seen all over the country.  Mount Pleasant is home to a large chicken distributing company once owned by a local named Bo Pilgrim.  The current company processes about 1 million chickens a day.  There is a huge bust of him along the highway.

We also stopped by the regional airport.  Another prominent local business man has 5 hangers there with 45 vintage aircraft, both civilian and military that he has had restored to flying condition.  We saw most of them in the hangers but there were three that we saw either taxiing or flying.  We also saw others in the restoration process.  This place has more aircraft on display and flying than the Commemorative Air Force unit that we visited in San Marcos, TX and rivals the Palm Springs, CA Air Museum.  http://www.midamericaflightmuseum.org/

After our visit in Mount Pleasant we were back on I-30 headed east into Arkansas.  With about 180 miles to go our arrival time in Little Rock was forecast by the GPS to be 5:20.  We encountered a lot of rain, heavy at times. There was also a 15 mile stretch of road construction where the road was narrowed to one lane.  I guess this is an important project, there were workers present even on a holiday.

We arrived at the Maumelle COE RV Park, http://tinyurl.com/p6eewt2,  at about 5:30 and were set up in site A-1 by 6 PM in-spite of the rain starting while I was unhooking the Jeep.  This is a beautiful park that we stayed at a few years ago.  It is situated on the Arkansas River, has paved road and parking pads.  There is 50 amp electric and water at each site and a dump station in the park.  There are more campers here than I expected, I thought the park would pretty much be cleared out with the holiday ending.  We didn't get a site by the river.  Due to the trees around us we have no DirecTV reception.  I tuned in 15 stations off the air from Little Rock.  The park doesn't supply wifi but the Verizion MiFi works moderately well.

We had a supper of left overs from El Primo in Mansfield.  Consider our large lunch in Mount Pleasant the small portions were just right.