Yesterday, my youngest son (Jonah) and I went with my brother and sister-in-law to Garvan Woodland Gardens in Hot Springs, Arkansas. It was an hour and a half drive that turned out to be a waste of time, gas and admission money. :-S

The first strike: their cafe’ was closed.

The second strike, there was a wedding scheduled for that day…

…so some of the place was blocked off to ‘outsiders’. Quick side note: Have you ever been in a public place where some private event (such as a wedding…especially a wedding) is going on and you walk around seeing all these people coming to and fro all dressed up and you feel like an outsider? OK, maybe it’s just me (and not to mention, I have a grudge against weddings and other joyous events of the like, anyway) but I felt that way yesterday. It’s like they are walking past me and thinking, “Ewww, people like that dressed in casual clothes and who aren’t part of this wedding shouldn’t be allowed in. We paid for the use of this place and the public are just mucking up the scenery.”

Yes, it’s probably just me….

So, onto the rest of my complaint.

It started out alright. The beginning of this hour long trail was nicely landscaped and showed promise, but as we walked along further, that promise and the flowers began to quickly thin out. So, their brochure and the web site make this ‘garden’ out to be a beautiful place with thousands of flowers everywhere and waterfalls and unicorns and such. We were really excited to go.

But we realized fairly early in the walk that there were more flowers in my brother’s front yard than there were here. We were extremely disappointed, especially since we drove so far to see it and paid to get in only to see what we could have seen anywhere within ten miles of where we lived.

To make matters worse, more than half of the area was under construction. Now I understand that sometimes places must get a makeover. Nothing wrong with that. But what I did have a problem with was not knowing this in advance. I never saw anything about construction on their web site. If it’s there, it wasn’t put where people can see it clearly. Something like that should be on the front page and in bold letters, if not on a banner.

So we have a closed cafe’, a wedding, barely any flowers, construction zones all over the place and then, get this, our coupons that were printed from their site said between certain dates (which we were within) that the gardens closed at 8:00 p.m. Nope. They told us they closed at 6:00 p.m. even though the coupons said otherwise.

How about a happy picture before I go on?

Or, maybe a cool one?

Anyway, to top it all off, where was the friggin’ chapel?! They advertise on the site and the brochure a beautiful outdoor wedding chapel called Anthony Chapel, but we did not see it anywhere! Nor did we see the Garvan Pavilion, which would have been a beautiful sight to see. It became apparent to us that maybe they were on the far side of the gardens, but the weird thing was that we saw no signs to point us in the right direction, or really any evidence of either structure being there at all. I mean sure, they have to be there somewhere, obviously, but you would think they would be two key points of interest for most visitors, so the obvious thing to do would be to put up visible signs no matter how far away they were.

I’m sure Garvan Woodland Gardens is a beautiful place to visit when it’s not under construction and there are actual flowers bloomed to see, but I would like to have been given the opportunity to plan my visit for a later date when it was actually ready for visitors, and they should have made sure people knew that important information in advance.

On another note, I’m having my gallbladder removed early in the morning and I’m terrified. :-(