As a child of the 1980s and ‘90s who grew up in Oklahoma, just over the Arkansas border, Fayetteville and Fort Smith were the only two real options on weekend sojourns to the city. They were equidistant, more or less, from my childhood home, so, really, our destination for family fun depended on a flip of the coin. Except, more often than not, that quarter came up ‘Fort Smith.’
It isn’t that way so much anymore. The population explosion in Northwest Arkansas over the course of the last 30 years or so turned NWA into its own metro.