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I love when nomadic serendipity takes us to experiences that we couldn’t even imagine a day prior.  While driving northward towards St. Louis, we decided to route through Arkansas up scenic byway 7.  This put us overnighting around Hot Springs, Arkansas.  We looked around, and discovered there was a national park and campground, so that was our aim for the evening.

First of all, the Gulpha Gorge Campground was amazing, right along a babbling creek and very affordable.  While there, we read up on what was avialable at Hot Springs National Park.  The park is unusual in that it’s not necessarily a preservation of a natural feature – like other national parks around the country. But rather, its focus was a historic row of bathhouses in a downtown setting that were previously a medicinal tourist draw.

One of the bathhouses, Buckstaff Bathhouse, is still run as part of the National Park. So in the morning we decided to indulge hot baths and massages. At $52/person, it was quite a value and very refreshing. But unlike any other spa service we’d ever encountered – it was more institutional like, but very memorable.

The video below captures our reactions to it right after our treatments.

Direct link to the video