It kinda feels like we're racing now, trying to see as much as we can before we're due in Washington, DC at the end of March, so we're only spending a day in towns like this, but Little Rock looks interesting enough to spend more time here. We are staying in Burns Park, the third largest municipal park in the country, they say here. It has lots of sports fields, woods for hiking and camping, and lots of old playground equipment painted in bright paint. My favorite structure, and Katie's too, was this big rocket ship:

While Mark worked yesterday morning, Katie and I went to the Arkansas Art Center, which had two shows I wanted to see: one on the villas (near Pompeii) of ancient Rome, which were buried by Vesuvius and are being dug up now, and one on toys designed by artists. Somehow the description in one of our Arkansas tourist pamphlets (they give the best visitor's information on Arkansas of any state we've visited so far) made it sound like the kids would be able to play with the toys, which of course they couldn't. The toys weren't that great, but the Roman exhibit was fabulous, and a quartet from the Little Rock symphony was practicing for a benefit in the evening, and the music was soooo beautiful. I couldn't believe the glass box of a room had acoustics so perfect sounding.



They had an entire room from a wealthy Roman villa brought over; here is part of it. After I took this picture (without a flash), a guard came over and told me even non-flash photography isn't allowed. Too bad, because I wanted a better closeup of the details of the walls; the images were really delicate in places.

When Mark was done working, we drove to the new Clinton Presidential Library. I like the building; they put it on the old railroad depot property, and use the depot as a volunteer center. Part of the ex-President's message is, is to get folks to get involved in public service, and I would have been interested to find out what kind of volunteering are coordinated there, but we ended up leaving quickly after touring the library, because Katie didn't enjoy it much. Mark and I could have spent more time there though.

People are looking at letters written to Clinton and from him during his time in office. The computer screens down there let you see his schedule for any day during his terms. A lot of the stuff was fluff, like showing his cubscout patches and Hillary's childhood doll, but some of it was really interesting too, like showing every step in what it takes to host a dinner for a foreign king. There was a model of the Oval Office during Clinton's day, and also his cabinet room (you could sit in that one, in the president's chair, which is two inches higher than the rest). I was taken by thinking about how interesting those meetings might have been.

This was one of the gifts given to the First Couple. I forget the artist's name, but I always love his stuff. Has quite a few in Vegas and the Bahamas (the mark of a great mind). Well, we're driving to Memphis today, and hopefully our mail will all be waiting for us in West Memphis, Arkansas, just across the border. I keep hearing different guesses about how long they hold mail for general delivery. we'll see!