Plan the whole trip Things to do in Bentonville, AR

Fly into Northwest Arkansas National Airport. The code is XNA, and the airport is in Highfill, not Fayetteville. There is no train. Rent a car or take a rideshare. Interstate 49, the main highway through Northwest Arkansas, runs along the east side of Bentonville.

The town turns on its square. The Walmart Museum sits on it, in the storefront of Walton’s 5 & 10, and this book measures every distance from that door. Two hotels are on the square and a third is two blocks off it. Onyx Coffee Lab is around the corner, and the farmers market sets up around the square on Saturday mornings from April through October.

Most of what a visitor comes for is close. The Momentary is about half a mile from the square. Crystal Bridges and the Amazeum are both about 0.7 miles north, and the Peel Museum is 0.8. The Museum of Native American History is 1.2 miles out. Compton Gardens, the small arboretum between the square and Crystal Bridges, is 0.3 miles away and carries a paved path between the two.

The trails are a little farther. Coler Mountain Bike Preserve is about 1.8 miles west of the square, and the Slaughter Pen trailhead about 2.1 miles north. The Bella Vista systems, the Back 40 and Little Sugar, are 6 to 7 miles north. The chain hotels sit 2 to 3 miles south and east, near I-49.

Tying it together is the Razorback Regional Greenway, a paved trail that runs 40 miles through seven Northwest Arkansas cities, from Fayetteville to Bella Vista. More than 10 miles of it pass through Bentonville: past Slaughter Pen, Crystal Bridges, Compton Gardens, downtown, and the Walmart Home Office. On a bike, it links downtown to Crystal Bridges and Slaughter Pen.

Then check the calendar. Bentonville’s week is uneven. Tuesday closes the Crystal Bridges galleries, the Amazeum, and Eleven, the museum’s restaurant. Monday closes the Momentary, the Museum of Native American History, and the Peel. Sunday closes those last two again, and twenty of the restaurants in this book. The tool below shows any day of the week, with your days marked.

Bentonville has six museums, and five of them are free. The one that charges is the Amazeum, the children’s museum. The best known is Crystal Bridges.

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art holds a collection that spans five centuries. General admission is always free. Temporary exhibitions are ticketed; members, veterans, visitors 25 and under, and SNAP recipients get into those free. The galleries are closed Tuesday, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and stay open until 8 PM on Thursday and Friday. Park in the garage off Museum Way. It is free, with a 7-foot clearance. Taller vehicles use the campus lots and the shuttle.

Eleven, the restaurant inside, serves lunch from 11 AM to 2:30 PM and is closed Tuesday. It has no regular dinner service. If the museum is the middle of your day, lunch there is the easy choice, and the planner will put it there.

The Momentary is Crystal Bridges’ contemporary art space, in a former cheese factory. General admission is free. The building is closed Mondays, Thanksgiving, and Christmas Day, and it stays open until 8 PM on Friday and Saturday. The Momentary Green and the outdoor art are open every day.

The Walmart Museum is on the square in the space of Walton’s 5 & 10. It is free and keeps the latest hours of the six: 10 AM to 9 PM Monday through Thursday, until 10 PM on Friday and Saturday, and noon to 6 PM on Sunday. The Spark Cafe inside is a soda fountain with Yarnell’s ice cream, made in Arkansas. It is dessert, not dinner.

The Scott Family Amazeum is a hands-on children’s museum, with about 50,000 square feet of exhibits and about an acre outside. It is closed Tuesday, Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day, and on Sunday it opens at 1 PM. Most Wednesdays it stays open until 7:30 PM for Priceless Nights, and from 4:30 admission is whatever you want to pay. An expansion is underway; the museum asks visitors to use Campus Parking on Museum Way.

Two smaller museums keep the same week, Tuesday through Saturday, and both are free. The Museum of Native American History, founded by David Bogle of the Cherokee Nation, holds more than 10,000 artifacts in a building that opened in 2008. It is open 11 AM to 5 PM. The Peel Museum & Botanical Garden is the 1875 Italianate home of Congressman Samuel West Peel, furnished and surrounded by gardens. It is open 10 AM to 5 PM, and tours are included in the free admission.

You do not need a bike to use Bentonville’s trails. This book lists fifteen trails and parks, from a garden path off the square to nearly fifty miles of trail in Bella Vista. Start with the ones you can reach on foot.

The Crystal Bridges trails are more than five miles of path through the museum’s 134 acres of Ozark forest. They are free, open sunrise to sunset every day, and leashed dogs are welcome. The paved Art Trail and North Forest Trail pass outdoor sculpture. The Crystal Bridges Trail runs through Compton Gardens, a free 7-acre garden of native plants, and into downtown. The garden’s foundation notes limited trail access while bridges are being improved.

Osage Park has paved trails and floating boardwalks through a 12-acre wetland beside Lake Bentonville. It opened in 2021, it is free, and it has a dog park.

For riders there are three large systems inside the city. Slaughter Pen, on the north side of downtown, has more than 23 miles of trail by the city’s count and is rated a Silver Level Ride Center by the International Mountain Bicycling Association. It runs from easy to extremely difficult, with a free-ride area of jumps, berms, and a wall ride. The Greenway runs through all three of its phases, so you can ride in from the square.

Coler Mountain Bike Preserve is 300 free acres west of downtown with more than 20 miles of trail. The Westside is for beginner and intermediate riders; the Eastside is for experienced ones, with downhill runs from The Hub. The paved Applegate Trail connects it to downtown. There are no bike rentals on site. Hand Cut Hollow, east of I-49, is sixteen miles of singletrack built entirely by hand, with seven downhill lines around a central hub.

North in Bella Vista are the long ones. The Back 40 has nearly 40 miles of singletrack, with a 21.4-mile outer loop. Little Sugar has nearly 50 by the city’s count, under bluffs along Sugar Creek. Both are open 5 AM to 10 PM. If you only walk, Bella Vista’s Tanyard Creek Nature Trail is about two miles past a waterfall, and bikes are not allowed on it.

This book does not rank restaurants. It lists ninety-five of them, forty-four downtown, and tells you which are open when you are hungry.

Downtown is where to eat on a first visit, because it is where you will already be. Across the whole book, thirty places take reservations, twenty-nine are marked good for children, and twenty-five list vegetarian options. Two are temporarily closed, and the finder below leaves them out.

Plan around Sunday and Monday. Twenty places in the book are closed on Sunday and fifteen on Monday. Midweek, almost everything is open. The finder below reads each place’s hours for the day and meal you choose.

A few places are inside something else. Eleven is in Crystal Bridges and serves lunch only. Spice Shuttle is at the 8th Street Market, and Manduca Tacos is at Osage Park. Each downtown hotel has a place to eat or drink in this book: Sestina at The Compton, The Hive at 21c, Junto at the Motto, and the Falfurrias rooftop at the AC Hotel.

Nine of the places are food trucks. Their hours are the ones they post, and a truck can move or close for the day, so check the listing before you go. The whole list, with menus and ordering links, is in the restaurant directory.

Use the coffee shop that is already on your route. There are ten in this book, and the clock below shows which are pouring at any hour of your trip.

Onyx Coffee Lab, at 100 NW 2nd Street, is beside the square and the farmers market. It opens at 6:30 AM and closes at 8 PM every day, the longest hours of any coffee counter here. Pets are not allowed, except service animals. Onyx also runs the bar inside the Momentary, open 10 AM to 5 PM and closed Monday; a cafe at The Preserve, reachable from the Greenway; and Doyenne, a weekday cafe on SE 5th Street built around coffee from women producers.

Airship has four. 5th Street was the first cafe and roastery, opened in the summer of 2018, and its porch has a fenced yard where dogs are welcome. The Pumphouse is in a 1954 pumphouse, with little parking at the door. The Porch, on the Walmart campus beside the Greenway, is weekdays only. The Coler cafe is open-air inside the preserve, about a mile on foot or by bike from the parking lots, and it closes for dangerous storms.

Kennedy Coffee has been on SE 14th Street since 2003 and opens at 6 AM on weekdays, the earliest in the book. 211 Cafe is inside the public library, roasts Guatemalan coffee on site, follows the library’s hours, and is closed Sunday.

Stay downtown if you can. The four downtown hotels are all within a mile of the square, and three of them are within two blocks of it.

The Compton is on the square, with 142 rooms, a bike valet, and Sestina among its restaurants. 21c Museum Hotel, on the square’s northeast corner, is a 104-room hotel that is also a contemporary art museum; pets are welcome for a $50 fee. The Motto by Hilton is two blocks off the square, with 175 compact rooms, a bike valet, and bike rentals. The AC Hotel is 0.9 miles out, near Walmart’s home office, with the Falfurrias rooftop lounge. Breakfast costs extra there, and there is no room service. All four check in at 4 PM and out at 11 AM.

If you came to ride, The Bike Inn is a restored motel built for it: in-room bike storage, a wash station, repair stands, and a 24-hour bike shop. It has 13 rooms, four of them cabins, and three van camping pads. Pets are allowed in the cabins and pads for a $25 fee.

The chain hotels are 2 to 3 miles from the square, on the south and east sides near I-49. For a longer stay or a family, Home2 Suites, TownePlace Suites, and Element all have kitchens in the rooms and a free breakfast. Element lends bicycles at no charge, and the Hilton Garden Inn sits beside the Greenway with free bike lockers.

Here is the book arranged into days. It uses your dates, the hours every place publishes, and what you said you came for. Change the planner and the days rebuild.

Each day starts with coffee at 8, at the first downtown counter open that morning. On a Saturday, the farmers market comes next. Then a morning stop, a midday stop, an afternoon, and sometimes an evening, each chosen only if the place is open at that hour on that date. Nothing repeats across days, and no day has more than one trail.

When Crystal Bridges falls at midday and Eleven is open, lunch is there. Otherwise the day lists every downtown restaurant open at 12:30. Dinner lists the downtown places open at 7 PM, or at 8 if the day has an evening stop. If you are bringing children, the plan will not put the Amazeum and Crystal Bridges on the same day. A stop marked “Open, beyond your picks” filled a slot when nothing you chose was open.