March 2024 | Photo Album

Table Rock Lake, in far northwestern Arkansas and southwestern Missouri, was completed in 1958. My parents purchased a tiny vacation home near its western end a decade later, in a county with many ties to my father’s ancestry. After 30 years of regular use, “the cabin” was sold off. Nevertheless, I have continued to vacation in that part of the Ozarks.

Growing up, I was aware of two retirement communities in northwest Arkansas. As I contemplate my own retirement within the next decade, I have opted to use some of our vacations as an opportunity to explore possibilities. If we ever were to relocate, cost of living would be a major factor, and both Missouri and Arkansas are, like Oklahoma, among the 10 cheapest states. So we have spent two consecutive Spring Breaks in rental homes in those retirement communities.

Bella Vista

Bella Vista, Arkansas was about 30 miles to the west of our lake cabin, or an hour’s drive given the difficult terrain. It was founded over a century ago as a resort, and it was converted into a retirement community in 1965. It incorporated as a city in 2006 and now has a population of over 30,000. Wendy and I spent part of Spring Break 2023 there.

Bella Vista offers plenty of golf, but I have no interest in that. However, I do like to hike and bike, and I love mountain vistas. The community already has over 40 miles of trails, and it has a plan to have 150 miles of them by 2025. The big drawback to Bella Vista, however, is that it is at the northern end of the fast-growing Northwest Arkansas (NWA) metropolitan area that is approaching a population of 600,000.

I am no stranger to living in a large city: I grew up in Oklahoma City when that metropolitan area was itself growing from about 490,000 to 700,000. After my move to Bartlesville, I continued to visit as the OKC metro grew to over one million. But I have now spent 35 years in an isolated town of around 35,000 and dislike the traffic, noise, and the hustle and bustle of metropolitan life.

I certainly appreciate having the 1,000,000-strong Tulsa metro area less than an hour’s drive away, but I’m quite glad Bartlesville is not a suburb. Spending a few days in Bella Vista last year so that we could experience the traffic of Bentonville and the other components of the NWA area made it clear that I wouldn’t want to live there full-time despite its scenic area and extensive trail system.

Holiday Island

Wendy and I have often vacationed near Eureka Springs, Arkansas. She enjoys looking at rocks in the streams off Lake Leatherwood, and I enjoy hiking, the vistas, and scenic drives through the Ozarks. For Spring Break 2024 I rented us a large home at Holiday Island, a retirement community at the western end of Table Rock Lake, just five miles north of Eureka Springs.

In 1965, Holly Corporation, owned by the Norsworthy family of Dallas, bought about 5,000 acres which they planned to use for a lake and golf resort, but they lacked the development capital to pull that off. So they sold their acreage to McCulloch Oil Corporation of Los Angeles, better known as the maker of McCulloch chainsaws. McCulloch also built resorts across the country, including Lake Havasu City in Arizona with its bizarre reconstruction of a London bridge.

Holiday Island officially opened in 1970, and friends of my parents had a gift shop on the island back then. Below is silent home movie footage of me on Holiday Island in 1971 along with me visiting Eureka Springs with my parents.

A helpful article in Arkansas Business says that in the 1980s the marketers at Holiday Island were sending out 100,000 pieces of direct mail each week across the midwest, with thousands of potential buyers flown in on a McCulloch Oil airliner for free lodging, golf, and boat rides. About 1/10 of the prospects would buy in.

They ran out of the most desirable lots in the mid-1980s. Lots too mountainous to build on became inexpensive tickets to the facility’s two golf courses, but their appeal has waned with golf’s declining popularity. Now residents wonder if they are worth $250,000 per year in red ink, and they have built a couple of trails, but those are nothing compared to what Bella Vista has to offer.

By 1990, McCulloch Oil had been taken over by an associate of the dreaded Michael Milken, who wanted to abandon the Holiday Island development and its 2,000 residents. Tom Dees, a long-time marketer for the company’s resorts, bought Holiday Island and did his best to keep it going.

In 2006, a commercial center was built at the southern end, and we found that a convenient place to buy groceries for our stay. However, the 2008 real estate crash would eventually lead Holiday Island Development Corp. to forfeit almost all of its commercial property to a couple of banks.

The community incorporated as a city in 2020 and had a half-dozen home projects underway in the spring of 2021. It has grown to about 2,500 people, but Tom Dees died in June 2023, and the future of the community with its aging infrastructure is uncertain.

Living Big

I rented a 3,000 square foot home in Holiday Island from Vacasa for $240 per night. That ensured we would have privacy, a deck with a beautiful sunset vista, and we could see what it was like to be there in a larger home. Although built in 1989, the home was resold in 2021 for $389,000 with modernized finishes.

Our so-called Meador Manor in Bartlesville is a 1981 home of 1,600 square feet with three bedrooms, two toilets, two bathtubs, a galley kitchen with dining area, and a patio. The four-bedroom home we rented had three toilets, a bathtub, shower, kitchen with island, two dining areas, and a massive deck.

The deck was the home’s best feature. I loved its layout, especially having two seating areas that weren’t in direct view of each other, with a third option on a lower level. A screened gazebo off to one side would provide shade and bug protection in the humid summers.

Inside, it was interesting to work in a larger kitchen that featured an island, as I’ve never lived in a home with that feature. As with most homes we rent, there was a modern range with an overhead vent and a glass cover over the electric coils, while Meador Manor still has its original 1981 Jenn-Air with modular exposed electric stove coils and a downdraft vent. I was glad to see that the microwave was a countertop unit, as I don’t like the elevated ones built above countertops or placed above a stove.

The most disconcerting things about the rental home were its size and linearity. It seemed like a hike from the master bath through the master bedroom, down a long hall, and across the expansive living room to the kitchen. The two of us rattled like peas in a pod in a home that was almost twice as large as what we are accustomed to. Wendy and I agreed that even if we won a lottery, we wouldn’t want a big home, let alone a mansion.

Another reason we rattled was a noticeable lack of carpeting. I have always lived in homes with wall-to-wall carpeting, which before World War II was a luxury out-of-reach of the middle class. The U.S. carpeting industry sold about six million square yards of tufted wall-to-wall carpeting nationwide in 1951, but that exploded to about 400 million square yards by 1968 when I was a wee lad. Wild colors and long shags were common; one of my childhood chores was raking the shag carpet.

But in recent decades consumers gravitated toward real or simulated hardwood floors, which were more neutral, considered more luxurious, and made it easier to “flip” a home to new owners. Some of this was fashion, where each generation tends to react against what was popular with previous ones. I also notice people with indoor pets like having robotic vacuums cleaning their hardwood floors and area rugs, while wall-to-wall carpeting and pets can be a problematic combination.

Wendy and I, however, love carpet for its warmth and sound deadening. I hate walking barefooted or sliding in my socks across an uncarpeted floor. We both noticed how loud the echoes were in the rental since it only had one area rug in the living room and two carpeted bedrooms; everything else was real or simulated hardwood.

We also love using DoorDash restaurant food delivery at home in Bartlesville, and while that service is available in Bella Vista, it is not practical in little Eureka Springs or Holiday Island. Finally, while I’ve never had an accident in over 40 years of driving the treacherous winding highways of the area, I wouldn’t want to face that on a daily basis, especially as I age.

So we have scratched off a couple of retirement living options off our list, and I have a greater appreciation for our current living conditions. But I do want to give full credit to the view from that deck!

Lake Leatherwood

While on break, we did our usual three-mile loop at Eureka Springs’ Lake Leatherwood. We started out from the parking area along the Foster and Beacham Trails, which are both hillier and sunnier than the other options.

I was pleased to note that they have updated the trail signage with sleek new poles that should last awhile.

At what I call the Crystal Creeks, Wendy hunted for rocks with crystals while I hiked on to the dam.

In March 2021, the dam walkway was closed because the railings had deteriorated too much, so I was delighted to see that the gate was open: the dam had been repaired.

It turned out that in September 2023 the city accepted a $52,000 bid from Stacy’s Stoneworks to repair the railings. I was very glad to see that the city’s Parks and Recreation Commission is investing in upkeep.

I strode out to the center of the spillway, where the wind was causing the water to surge.

I enjoyed making a video sweep from atop the dam before returning to pick up Wendy the rock hound at the bottom of a Crystal Creek. We then took the scenic, and flat, shoreline trail back to the parking area.

There was a paddleboat out on the lake, and we passed a couple sitting by the lake smoking marijuana. Arkansas, like Oklahoma, now winks at the latter practice, allowing marijuana “for medical use”. I considered holding my breath to avoid secondhand sedation. My, how things have changed over my lifetime.

We look forward to future vacations in northwest Arkansas, even though we wouldn’t settle down there. Much the same applies to other favorite vacation spots of ours: Santa Fe, New Mexico is fun to visit, but the winters are not to our liking, and I love visiting the Pacific Northwest in the summer while recognizing that the rainy and cloudy weather in other seasons would not appeal to me.

At this point, my inclination is to retire in Bartlesville but escape to the Pacific Northwest from June through September. Wendy has only been out there once, for our honeymoon in 2016, while I made summer trips there in 1998, 2005, 2006, 2008, and 2009. One of our favorite stops was in Astoria, Oregon along the mouth of the Columbia River a few miles from the Pacific Ocean. Below is a comparison of the climate there to that of Bartlesville.

Obviously, Astoria is not the place to be if you like to swim or lounge by a pool. And while its winters are not harsh, due to its proximity to the ocean, they are overcast and rainy. But from May through September the daily chance of rain is actually higher in Bartlesville than in Astoria.

Since Wendy has only seen northern Oregon and up along the coast of Washington state to Victoria, British Columbia, this June I plan to show her southwestern Oregon and far northwestern California. I’ll call it more retirement research, but of course it will really be a nice vacation.

Photo Album