Happy Trails: Lake Columbia Arkansas

We left our beautiful campsite on the Mississippi River in Vidalia LA Sunday April 25th. Beautiful morning after 2 days of stormy weather. Clear blue skies, nice spring breeze. We followed highway 425 north to Arkansas. All was good road, pretty scenery and mostly 4 lanes..... until we ventured north of I-20. Then everything went from good to .... not so good. Extremely narrow roads with no shoulders, full of potholes and old patches. Twisty, turny, hilly roads! At least they were doing some road construction... which slowed us way down when the road wasn't beating us up! What should have taken us an hour on 425 from I-20 north to highway 82 in Arkansas took us more like 3 hours! That big Ford 450 duelly isn't the easiest thing to handle and the seats ride harder than a buckboard!

By the time we got to ElDorado Arkansas, we pulled into a Walmart parking lot and I made sandwiches for lunch... Chuck was worn out. To make matters worse, once we began heading due west on 82 we hit a strong headwind. We knew Lake Greeson was another 4+ hours away. Once back in the truck. I started looking for an Arkansas State Park. You know how on all the maps they show state parks with a green fir tree and a tent under it? Well I found one 11 miles north of Magnolia, Logoly State Park. Well the road there was worse than the road we had left behind in LA! Then we get there and find out it offered only walk-in tent camping! YIKES! The ranger was nice and told us of another place about 20 miles west called Lake Columbia Campground, a county owned and run park. It is beautiful there! So I had to take some photographs to show you!

Tall trees!