Sidenote

I've been getting some responses that the blog emails are hard to read with the light colored font. My advice to you is to follow the link http://www.conradandbaloo.blogspot.com/ and go directly to the website. It has a black background that makes the pastel font pop.
Anywho, since I have a very good connection to the internet here, I thought I'd add some photos that I haven't been able to fit it and write a little bit.



Gabe in front of the Anniversary Gates





Yellow Fever Research Center/ Greatest Metal Objects Library in America







We are in a Hot Springs, Arkansas KOA right now. I'm pretty sure the gestapo runs this joint. It is the strictest, most moderated campsite we've experienced yet. At each site there is a cement slab with a metal grill on it for the firepit. The cement is cold and creates quite a challenge for the fire to actually get hot enough to burn. They announced over the loud speaker at 8am this morning that breakfast would be served for exactly one and a half hours. "NO ___" signs (no bicycling, no skateboarding, no flying, no rollerblading, no laughing, diving, singing, crying, listening, whispering, playing, inhaling, relating...) abound. There is a 4-digit code to get into the bathrooms. Now, I know that this is for safety but the place is at least a mile from the road and the bathrooms are attached to the office and situated deep in the camp. Who are they worried about? There are streetlights so numerous that it felt like sleeping outside my apartment in Chicago! Especially since they had traffic. They have a sentry on duty, tooling around at all the hours of the night in a golf cart. At least they have bamboo. Gabe recommends this KOA as much as he recommends people to eat raw earthworms. The dogs are so bored here they aren't even trying to escape the wide open camper door.
Making soup at the Gestapo's KOA.

Four of many beautiful hand made rosettes that adorn the two giant gates.

The National Ornamental Metal Museum was really an awesome experience. It was so homey and familiar. Everyone seemed like they were in your friend circle in college. They had a little bronze foundry and a place to do small iron pours. A couple of the Artists-in-Residences had some really nice work. Very subtle and detailed. It was the very lack of strictness there that gave it that comfortable feeling. The indoor gallery part of the museum was immaculate albiet small and intimate. It is part of a civil war era campus that housed a hospital and the number one Yellow Fever research center. They had turned the smaller buildings like the nurses quarters and the surgeons quarters into the museum and the living spaces for the artists and the director. The Yellow Fever Research Center was turned into the best metal objects library in the country. They could really use Gabes expertise and I could really benefit from one of the Artist-in-Residence positions or at least one of the weekend classes. I think we'll be back there again. Plus, we never got to go to Graceland so now we are obligated to go back.

Well, I need to shower and we have an 8 hour drive to Tiff and Dave's in Austin Texas. Later.