Reece's Pieces: That's One Expensive Old Lady!

The Grand Old Lady of the Ozarks

After leaving the cemetery in Gravette, Arkansas after my Aunt Betty’s funeral last week, my wife and I decided to take the long way home. With no particular place to go, we followed curvy two-lane highway 72 through northwest Arkansas in search of a place to spend the night.

“How about spending the night at the Crescent Hotel?” I asked. Sometimes referred to as “The Grand Old Lady of the Ozarks”, the Crescent Hotel first opened for business in Eureka Springs on May 20, 1886. In the past 125+ years it has gone from successful hotel to a Conservatory for Young Women to the Baker Hospital and Health Resort and back to a hotel again. Some might add the word “haunted” to the name. In fact, a brochure for the Crescent Hotel describes it as “the haunted hotel where some guests checked out . . . but never left”.

“Sounds fine to me - I’ll get them on the phone and you can negotiate the room rate with them” said my wife. “You are better than that than me!” she added, dialing, and then handing me the phone. The Crescent's website featured rooms in the $120-$150 range, well over our normal price range, but hey, it was only for one night! A “Ghost Package” shown on the website included “a deluxe room, two tickets to the ghost tour, two t-shirts, breakfast for two, and a cooly cup for $209. A little rich for my blood, I thought, but maybe I could get them down.

“Yes, may I help you?” asked the desk clerk.

“My wife and I are looking for a room for tonight and I’d like to find out what kind of deal you can give us” I explained.

“Well, we are pretty full tonight, but I CAN get you into a suite for only $329” she explained cheerfully. Then, perhaps in response to the gagging sound I sometimes make during heated negotiations, she said “Tell you what . . . I’ll knock off $40 and you can have it for only $289”. Actually, had we accepted her offer we would have saved ANOTHER $40. No need for a ghost tour when the price she quoted already scared us to half to death. I declined the generous offer and we sought ghost-free (and, hopefully, bed bug free) lodging in a (much) lower price range.

Later, on my favorite travel guide website TripAdvisor, I discovered that recent guests of the Crescent were uniformly complaining that the elevator in the four-story Crescent Hotel had been out of order for 18 months. I feel a little bad now. Maybe they planned to use the $289 they wanted from us to fix the elevator.

We spent the night at the much more budget-friendly Lookout Lodge, also in Eureka Springs. The main thing I’d suggest you “look out” for if you should ever stay there is that you don’t get a room under a room that has a rumbling Jacuzzi bath like we did. While the people above us were drowning their troubles in a bubbling Jacuzzi bath the noise was also loud enough to drown out the sound on our TV. But, for under a hundred bucks total we stayed at the Lookout Lodge and had a very tasty dinner at Bubba’s BBQ (motto – It May Not LOOK Famous but It Is).

The next day, after a drive around the beautiful Eureka Springs Historic Homes loop, we headed north on Arkansas 23 in the general direction of home. As I navigated the highway’s twists and turns, my wife suddenly said, excitedly, “Oh, look! Is that the Christ of the Ozarks statue over on that mountain?”

“Sorry” I said. “This road is too curvy for me to look right now.”

After carefully scanning the horizon for a minute, my wife said “That’s ok. I think it might have been a water tower instead”.