Hot Springs...

Decided to let the house dry out a day.

6 days of rain with 100% humidity, make it hard to paint...

so much to my Dad's disappointment I rounded everyone up early this morning, made pancakes, eggs, and bacon, and we headed out.

!st stop The bank...

The Collective had emptied the piggy banks into zip bags.

Our New bank, does not have a change machine....WTF? They also did not have my papaerwork for my banking (done over 3 weeks ago) processed yet. They had only DH on the account despite my filling out paperwork, and my names on the checks...I was not happy.

so then I took The Collective to another bank....

They wanted to charge the kids 5% for using the "change machine"....seriously. SR told them if the church got 10% and they got 5%, he would certainly lose some of his hard earned cash. They ended up waiving the fee....

They had $70.00 in earned piggy bank, and Easter money. Holy smokes...

So I promised them we would go to the toy Chest in Hot Springs....

After wrangling with banks for almost an hour....we finally left for Hot Springs...


The collective started not feeling good about 1/2 way into the trip....thank God for dramamine....I did not want to clean up puke.

We did manage to drive through Benton, and Bryant, and saw plenty of tornado damage....that was one heck of a storm folks....the storms, and tornadoes left and erratic path. I have photos and will post them soon.






We then started out journey at the Fordyce Bathhouse...

the restrooms were out of order, due to the storms and heavy rains....not good when children are in tow...

Hot Springs is a people watching mecca. We saw a 15 year old girl, with 2 children and an jailhouse ankle bacelet on....holy cow.....my Dad saw someone roll a joint and smoke it outside of a souvineer shop, we also saw a lot of women in their 50's with cropped denim jackets and gold belts...weird.

We ended up going down to the Arlington Hotel, and sitting on the veranda and having an early morning drink....Dad chose coke, I ordered his girlfriend a glass of wine, I had a Bombay saphire and tonic, and the Collective had Sprites. It was nice to sit under the sun....

We then proceeded to try and shop. PN loved the clothing shops, and anything with sequins, and bling on it....SR was complaining of boredom.

We then got to the toy Chest to find the shop was actually flooded with 3 feet of water due to "The storms"....crap......so they woud not let the Collective in, as they were restoring the shop.


the kids were ok with it, once the guy that runs the store gave SR the new Thomas, and new Rokenbok catalogs...

We had popcorn for lunch, headed out to a few new stores and then headed back to Little Rock to go to The other Toy Store.

PN, was fascinated with a sort of pogo stick thing you hang from the ceiling, and a double scooter, she zoomed all around the store with it.....

she found very little there, and decided she wanted a new bike with her allowance money.

LONG DAY, and I am beat....will update tommorow, and hope to post some tornado photos...