I am attracted to the name “Arkadelphia,” it makes me chuckle because it seems to be a take off on Philadelphia, which means brotherly love. Delphia means brother, I wonder what Arkadelphia is supposed to mean? Perhaps it was just a playful name.

I found the location of the hotel in Arkadelphia to be yet another boring cluster of hotels, fast food joints and service stations near a freeway off-ramp. However, a quick trip around the vicinity revealed a much different picture. I took a short loop into the country and found the area had many upper-middle class homes nestled in the woods. It is within a few miles of a nice lake with a State Park offering camping and fishing experiences. Arkadelphia is the home of a state university. In this case, while the traveler encounters more of the same “industrial” conditions of crowded cookie-cutter services, the residents likely experience beautiful and enriching environment not far from the big city of Little Rock.

The trip east across Arkansas surprised me because of how open and unpopulated the country side is. The first 120 miles were through vast conifer plantations, interspersed with what appeared to be woodlands of hardware trees. Logging trucks were common on the highway, carrying loads of logs all about twelve inches in diameter. Apparently they harvest the plantations when the trees reach a foot or so in diameter. I also encountered truckloads of 2×4 lumber. I suppose there must be stud mills (lumber mills turning logs into 2×4 studs for housing) in the area, but I didn’t encounter any. I also expect to have found pulp mills, or possibly electrical plants using the wood from the plantations for fuel. However, I didn’t see any signs of any of these types of processing plants on the road that I took.

The road across Arkansas traveled over a series of “hills,” that seemed more like undulations that hills. It was basically flat county with a bit of ripple to the surface. I encountered very few towns, it was mostly unpopulated country with small clearings in the forest for a few homes along the way. If the route I took was at all representative of the rest of the state, it looks to me like it is almost all forest land with a few small towns and a couple of large cities. I hadn’t envisioned Arkansas as a massive forest, but that is what I encountered.

The eastern sixty miles or so of my trip across Arkansas was through very large farms growing some hay, a lot of corn, and crops that were unfamiliar to me. It reminded me a lot of the farmland in the Sacramento Valley north of Sacramento because of the size of the fields, I guess that they are about a section (square mile) each.

The drive across Arkansas was singularly monotonous with very little of interest. It was all trees, farm land, house every few miles, interspersed with a tiny town every twenty or thirty miles. I settled down an drove just to get to something, anything, more interesting.