After Vickburg, we pushed on to at least make it to Little Rock, Arkansas for the night. Did you know there’s a Transylvania in Louisiana? Me neither. The linked Wikipedia entry says that the population was 743 according to the 2000 census report (incidentally, the last census to have a citizenship question on it). I’m guessing the population has decreased a bit since then. When we drove through, it looked like Transylvania was basically a ghost town, complete with a boarded up, slowly crumbling brick elementary school.
Once we got settled for the night in Little Rock, we realized that we were just a few minutes away from the Bill Clinton Presidential Library and Massage Parlor. Granted I’m no particular fan of our 42nd President, but how often are we in Little Rock for the night? So it was that with a bit of extra complaining from The Terror Team (“Really Dad? Another museum? Can we just be about going home?”) we set our sights on a visit to the vanity project of the 3rd worst president of my lifetime.
Probably the most interesting things to me were the recreation of the Clinton era Oval Office, the Situation Room, and the binders of the President’s daily schedule. I don’t have any pictures of the Oval Office, mainly because those cost $15 each. Maybe when we visit a different presidential library. A long timeline showed the various “highlights” of the Clinton presidency, with a heavy dose of spin. The collection of presidential artifacts was definitely interesting as well.
A lot of the displays about White House life really underscored to me the fact that regardless of how someone feels about the President, an opportunity to visit the White House is a once in a lifetime chance for most people. Treating it as a cheap way to score some political points for one side or the other benefits no one, and really only hurts the one passing up the invitation.
We only stayed for a couple of hours. By then it felt like we’d pretty much seen everything, unless someone wanted to do a deep dive into the minutia of President Clinton’s day-to-day schedule. I didn’t get any takers for that one.
We pushed on to Kansas City for the night, only to find that our hotel had booked us into a different hotel after our room suffered some water damage. No complaints, we ended up with a two room suite comped by the Marriott. Not too shabby for our final night away from home.