Taking a lot of baths is a great reason to go to Hot Springs, Arkansas where 143 degree waters flow out of the mountain begging to be cooled to tolerable temperatures for healing what ails you.

In and out of the tub was my style for four days there but my traveling partner and husband G. W. Tibbetts kept his clothes on all week and explored dry-land Hot Springs.

He found exquisite gardens, racing horses, meandering boats and a little downtown with a surprising number of high-quality galleries and antique shops.

I dried off to find him for lunch and dinner so we met some good cooks and fine chefs, plus a remarkable woman who’s been serving barbecue since 1958. Couldn’t bring her home but we do have two bottles of the sauce she slathers on chipped pork and meaty ribs.

Hot Springs offers an array of familiar motels, and the historic Arlington Hotel that has welcomed folks like us, plus presidents, gangsters and celebrities, in downtown since 1875. We roamed the halls, peeked into guest rooms, relaxed in the lobby and I stretched out in the hotel’s historic baths, but we spent our nights at Lookout Point Lakeside Inn, a five-year old oasis on Lake Hamilton.

Ten rooms here, with balconies or patios and views of the lake and Ouichita Mountains. Pampering is the personality, starting with raspberry-stuffed French toast for breakfast, a canoe for borrowing and woven rope hammocks on the lawn.

Lots of choices in Hot Springs, whether a week of “which waters and what spa treatment to choose next” or “am I off to the races or catching a bass?”

Either agenda, everyone’s drinking the water. We didn’t know to take some empty bottles with us to fill at the six city-approved hot water jug fountains but plenty of others did. This is supposed to be healing water: falling as rain 4,000 years ago and now emerging from a depth of 8,000 feet.

The chemical analysis in parts per million is easy to check out around town if it helps to know how much silica, calcium, magnesium, potassium, fluoride and more you’re drinking.

I preferred pretending I was a 1920s woman “quaffing the elixir” as was said in the heyday of Hot Springs bathing.

A bottle of that water is nice to have while strolling the 210-acres of Garvan Woodland Gardens. Flowers, trees and grasses you’d expect in a state botanical garden and they are abundant here. Handsome stone walls and walkways are a bonus, as is a meandering wooden bridge as curved as the back of a Windsor chair.

This garden is one of only eight public woodland botanical gardens in the United States and the only one on water so it’s a different experience from other gardens we’ve walked.

It’s actually a peninsula, with 4 ½ miles of Lake Hamilton shoreline. For me that means being on land and looking toward the water. If you have a boat, just sail right on in because Garvan Woodland Gardens has an 18-stall boat dock.

Seven thousand mums were being planted when we were there in late September. March and April will feature 93,000 tulips.