Day 37 - West Memphis, Arkansas

This morning it looked like the sky had fallen to the ground - what the Irish call 'a soft morning'. This made for interesting driving across the very flat and waterlogged land! There were no hills until just southwest of Little Rock, which was my first destination. I visited the Clinton Presidential Library; an interesting building, which has been compared (unfairly) to a trailer! I liked it, and it works very well as a display space. It's well worth the trip, with historical presentations together with a re-creation of the Oval Office when President Clinton was in office, and displays of many of the gifts presented to the Clintons. There were also reminders that when President Clinton left office in 2001 the budget deficit was zero ... Hmmm, I wonder what happened in the 8 intervening years?

There was also a very funny video loop of extracts from Clinton's various speeches to the National Press Awards - he was very good at self-deprecation!

I had thought of having lunch at the apparently excellent Cafe 42 in the basement, but by the time I had finished looking around it was closed, so I walked down the street and found an excellent deli with great coffee and pastrami sandwiches. The museum store was disappointing - rather tacky merchandise, I thought - but they had lots of T-shirts, mugs, pins, etc., saying 'I Miss Bill' ;-)

So, back on the road again, and at least it had stopped raining, though it's much cooler than my days on the eastern shore! All the tourism hereabouts seems water-related - fishing, boating, canoeing, lakeshore holiday cabins, and lots of shrimp and crab eateries. There are also lots of rice and cotton fields, so it's a very rural, agricultural economy. I'm not sure what all this rain means for this year's crops, though.