Hot Springs, Arkansas (Nov 27-30)

Hot Springs Arkansas may seem like a weird place to travel to, but we actually based the trip around it.

We want to hit every national park eventually. Seeing as how this was the closest one to St. Louis (other than the Arch), it seemed like a good idea. 

We stayed in what was advertised as an adult treehouse. It wasn't. It was just an A-frame lake house that happened to be on stilts. But it was still incredibly nice. 

We had this view from the kitchen, not too shabby. 

Tulsa, Oklahoma (Nov 25-27)

Sal and I found ourselves with a excess of PTO, but not a ton of money at the end of this year. Our house is still chaos. We can only relax by leaving. So we engineered a "cheap" vacation. 

We had so much fun driving from Seattle to Portland last year that we planned a casual road trip. One where we don't have to actually be anywhere at a certain time so that if we wanted to pull off the road to see the worlds largest ball of yarn, we could. 

We left Friday morning after Thanksgiving, getting on the road somewhere around 8-8:30 AM. Sometimes I forget not every highway is like 70/170/270. 44 outside of St. Louis is an easy ride. Rarely was I finding both lanes plugged up with slow moving trucks. I didn't see any cops. It was a nice ride in the sunshine, listening to podcasts.