I thought now would be as good a time as any to start my travel blog for Little Rock, Arkansas.  Though with only an hour left of battery life, chances are I’m going to have to pick it back up when we eventually get to H-Town.  It’s probably not the best of times for me to start writing about this trip, however, because I’m settling in to a 7 hour stint in the Bill and Hilary Clinton international airport, not exactly the best way to end our Bill-grimage (this being what we nicknamed our trip, a pilgrimage to visit the home of Bill Clinton).

But wait, let me rewind a little and explain what led us to such a stupid ‘layover’.

We have learned a couple lessons from previous vacations.

Lesson #1: More time.

We had this issue in D.C, San Francisco, Seattle, pretty much every one of our weekend trips – we never leave enough time to accomplish the things that we want to do, we’re always left wanting more, and, while this is probably OK for an American who has their entire life to return to these places, we are always seeking something new, so unless you’re my BFF and live in IA, we don’t tend to re-visit any place more than once, at least not for the foreseeable future.

Naturally, when it’s a city, or state relatively close to Houston, Texas, we decide to drive.  San Antonio or Austin, TX – 3hr drive, Corpus Christi, TX – 4hr drive, Dallas, TX 5hr drive, New Orleans, LA – 6hr drive, Oklahoma City, OK – 7hrs Little Rock, AR? It was set to be at least an 8hr (+ pit-stops) drive.

This is all common sense, I mean, to fly to San Antonio would take longer, than to drive – not the flight itself, but the entire airport process, from check-in to baggage claim, plus, more expensive, as you’d then be ‘sans voiture’.  We’d learned from OKC, and, even NOLA to an extent that anything over a 6hr drive, realistically requires the trip be extended by 2 days, to allow for the drive there, and home – which isn’t great when hubby has a set number of vacation days to take in a year, and you’re trying to maximise those vacation days.  So, we made a game-changing plan this time, to fly, and, given that flights to Little Rock, AR, were very reasonably priced, we ended up not coming out too far behind on cost, but being way ahead with regards to time – arriving in Little Rock at 8am Friday morning, and arriving back to Texas at 8pm on Monday night, four full days, 3 nights.

Lesson #2: Expense.

Usually, if it’s not one of the neighbouring places to Houston that we’re going to, we fly.  Which tends to mean the added expense of hiring a car, especially if the State Capitol building is not in the ‘main attraction’ City, like Seattle, for example, the Capitol (and other main attractions) were outside the city itself.

For Little Rock, however, it was one of the few cities we’ve thus-far come across, that is what we term, a ‘walkable’ city.  Score! No car hire cost, which, in financial terms (which is essentially the bottom line of any trip) would have set us back a few hundred bucks!

I’d done a lot of research around Little Rock (it was going to be hubby’s Christmas present, a camping trip of all things, but due to extremely cold weather, we postponed it) and discovered that a lot of their attractions were free, or very minimally priced.  This was both a surprising, and welcome discovery.  I think the most we paid for an attraction was $7 a piece for the Bill Clinton Presidential center, and since we weren’t bringing a car, we had no additional parking fees (if there are any) to consider.

For room and board, that’s always left up to the hubby to investigate.  He’s got that ‘priceline instinct’, though for Little Rock, we’d recommend NOT priceline-ing your hotel, as it could lead to any number of badly reviewed places to go and see.  He had a momentary urge to book us in to ‘The Capitol’ hotel, which, when we walked past every day, I can see why, from the outside it looks grand and gorgeous.  The inside, I’m told, is totally impressive – though we’d probably not have left the reportedly exquisite room while we were there.  All reviews for this place are over 90% and excellent.

Why didn’t we go with this place? Well, it was going to be $750 + tax + breakfast for the 3 nights.  And while they did offer cheaper rooms, there was no advantage to staying in those ‘cheaper rooms’, over staying somewhere else.  The potentially winning factor for the expensive room, for Col, was the European tub – somewhere lush for me to steep for a few hours, but for me? That’s a week’s worth of hotel right there, I couldn’t find a way to justify it in my head (or bank balance!)

Where did we end up? In a Double Tree just across the street from The Capitol Hotel.  We ended up with 3 nights, plus breakfast for both of us, plus free internet for multiple devices, two dinners and one dessert ordered by room service, plus all taxes and fees for $400.  Parking, if we’d had a car, would have been $5 a night, you get warm chocolate and walnut cookies on check-in, you’re right in the center of downtown little rock, there’s a tram stop right outside the hotel for those non-walkable locations (for example, North Little Rock across the bridge).  Not only that, but they allowed us to check-in SUPER early, we got to the hotel by 9am, check-in isn’t until 3pm, but they found us a room, without so much as a ‘tut’ or an eye-roll.

The hotel itself was good, I think we ended up with a queen bed, which, compared to our bed in Houston, was small, but adequate.  They had no interactive ‘movie-purchasing’ system on the TV – which is something we like to use when we’re on vacation, rainy days, early nights, or just if we’re feeling lazy and not wanting to go out into the land of tourists.  This was a downside, we were ‘stuck’ watching whatever movies were on TV, which aren’t always great.

One of the major draws to going back to this hotel for us, was the AC unit.  It was one of the very few hotels that we’ve ever been to, that we could get the night-time temperature down to ‘Arctic’, which is Col’s go-to temperature for nighttime.  The AC was excellent and Col slept better than he does in most hotels.

No fridge, no microwave and excessively SLOOOOOOW elevators, were mostly combated by the gorgeous river-side view we had and the fact that the staff and the free shuttle were both excellent, and breakfast (which we normally don’t like in a hotel) was delicious, and something we ‘used’ every day – we really don’t tend to drag our butts out of bed on vacation for breakfast, but the 11am cut-off made it do-able, even for the lazy McMasters.

One other thing about Little Rock, downtown doesn’t have a single freakin’ CVS, Walgreens, Walmart, Target, no souvenir shops or Starbucks line the streets.  It’s a small-town, with small businesses.  In fact, the whole bloody place shut down on Sunday, we were lucky it was raining and we spent most of our time indoors, and while the attractions are seemingly ‘open’, it took us hours to find somewhere to eat, that was both open and decently reviewed on a Sunday afternoon.

Now we’re back to the later flight home, the flight leaving at 7pm was over $100 cheaper than the flight leaving at noon, we figured ‘why not?’ (though in hindsight, with check out being at 11am instead of the usual noon, we lost an hour from the get-go!)  We figured we’d spend the day sight-seeing and hit up the airport around 5pm.

But, since our to-do list was done (and we weren’t left with that ‘wanting more’ feeling we normally are),  I guess that we made the poor mistake of  still being programmed to the good ole Continental days, when, if you turned up to the airport and requested you go on standby, they’d do it, squeeze you into an earlier flight and spend the day trying to sell your evening flights – which tend to be more sought after.

United, on the other hand, require a $75 per person fee, to get put on the standby list.  Trust me – it was tempting – 7hrs listening to smooth airport jazz is slowly making me reconsider it on a 2-hourly basis, when each interim flight to Houston gets boarded.  While we were sitting there, two guys turned up just as their flight was taxing to the runway, they confessed to the gate agent that they hadn’t given themselves enough time to get through security, that it was ‘TSA’s fault’.  The agent told them that it’s required that people get to the airport with enough time to get through security, and at least two hours pre-flight, but he moved them to a later flight – no cost.

So, we get there almost 8 hours early, and watch two half-empty flights take off and they want $150 to bump us up? Yet two dudes, who admitted that it was their own fault that they missed their flight got bumped for free?!?! Are you KIDDING ME?!

I can think of any number of things to spend $150 on and United unnecessarily being douche-bags isn’t one of them!

The worst of it is, if we’d come in February, I’d have still been a Gold member of their reward programme, so we’d have been put on standby for free.  Bollocks.  Loyalty seems to mean nothing to United – I’ll remember that in future!

Though I guess that being stuck in this jazz-hell for the next five hours, gives me the chance to blog about the wonders of Little Rock, AR for you fine readers.  So, I’ll get right on that before my netbook battery dies – and no, I don’t have my charger handy, hubby made the assumption that United would actually give a sh*t and try and get us home before 8pm tonight, so he packed both our chargers.  In about two hours, both our laptops will run out of juice, and then the fun will begin, meanwhile, let me tell you about Little Rock, cause in reality, it really ain’t a bad place to visit!

Up next, the ‘Things to do‘ and ‘Where to eat‘ in Little Rock, Arkansas…