Trip Report Part Seven

We spent the Memorial Day Weekend at Crater of Diamonds State Park in Arkansas. 

That was also the opening weekend for the water park that adjoins the diamond field, so getting a reservation for the weekend was almost right up there with actually finding a diamond in the Arkansas dirt.  I wasn’t thinking about Memorial Day when I made the reservations back in February, but if I had waited another week, they probably wouldn’t have been available. 

According to their literature, Crater of Diamonds is the eighth largest diamond field in the world, and the only one where visitors are free to keep anything they find.  Less than a month before we got there, Susie Clark of Evening Shade, AR, picked up a 3.69 carat diamond from the surface of the plowed field.

Campsites at the park are large, well appointed, and recently refurbished.  Ours had a large area with a picnic table, a fire ring and a cooking grill, and immediately behind that, a big level tent pad.  Unfortunately, the recently paved parking area for our trailer was not anywhere near level.  I carry some 2X10s to drive up on for just that situation, so we were able to level the trailer, but that left about a two foot drop from our bottom step to the ground.

We did try our hand at finding diamonds, and brought out some interesting pebbles.  According to the park ranger, we didn’t find anything worth keeping.

About 10 miles outside the park, on the other side of Murfreesboro, we discovered a Corps of Engineers lake with a marina and park on the Little Missouri River.  It was a beautiful place – somewhere we might want to see again.

The last night at Crater of Diamonds, we had our only bad weather of the trip – an hour or so of heavy rain and gusty winds.  It turned out that we caught the northern end of a line of storms that brought tornadoes to East Texas and to Shreveport, LA.  Nothing so dramatic where we were – we lost our TV satellite picture once or twice, but that was about it.

Our last stop was an overnight in Teneha, TX as we headed for home.