Day Trips from Little Rock

America's oldest national park pairs historic Bathhouse Row with steaming pools you can slide into. The town curls around the springs as if 1925 never ended, art-deco facades, thermal fountains on every corner, and the faint hiss of 143°F water.

Arkansas's first state park crowns a mountain plateau where 95-foot waterfalls dive into cedar-scented hollows. Inside Mather Lodge, the stone fireplace snaps year-round while ravens bank through the canyon below.

The glass-and-steel Clinton Presidential Library lifts from the Arkansas River like a bridge to the 1990s, complete with a full-scale Oval Office replica and motorcade relics. Walk next door to the River Market for lunch.

The only diamond-producing site on Earth open to the public. You kneel in freshly plowed dirt, turning stones while red-tailed hawks wheel overhead and pine scent drifts from the woods.

College town Conway teams up with the oddly named Toad Suck Park, where barges nose up the Arkansas River and the annual Toad Suck Daze turns downtown into a swirl of live music and frog-jumping races.

Arkansas's loftiest peak gives hang-gliders a runway above patchwork farmland fading into Oklahoma. From the lodge's stone terraces, sunset spills across two states while hummingbirds needle the wildflowers.