Easy Days

Sunday, November 25, 2007 -- Joe Wheeler State Park near Rogersville, AL

Still here, and probably will be until Tuesday. One of the great things about our life right now is that we can adapt and adjust to our environment... so when they call for rain in the next day or so, we can simply stay an extra day and wait for better weather.

The last couple days have been slow and easy for us. We like the park and our site, so it really becomes "home" for a few days. Dar's been working on a project and I've been reading and writing. Doesn't sound real exciting but we're enjoying it.

We did visit Wheeler Dam, another TVA dam on the Tennessee River. Completed in 1936, it's over a mile long and the difference between the upstream pool and the downstream pool is as much as 50 feet. The upstream pool, or lake, created by the dam is 67,000 acres and has over 1,000 miles of shoreline. Our campsite is on this lake.

We had a nice visit with our neighbors around their campfire last night. He's a long-haul truck driver and we got the lowdown on some of the routes we've been planning to take. For example, "stay off I-55 between Jackson and New Orleans because the road's falling apart and it's extremely rough." He suggested a better and less congested route to get down to I-10.

As I wrote earlier, we'll be here until Tuesday. We're planning a short drive that day, first getting over to the Natchez Trace and then south to the Tupelo area where there's a state park we'd like to try. The Natchez Trace is a 444 mile parkway that follows an old historic trail and connects Natchez, Mississippi with Nashville, Tennessee. It's administered by the National Parks Service. There is no commercial traffic and the highest speed limit is 50 mph... it's essentially a very long and narrow park. I'd like to drive the portion between Cherokee, Alabama and Jackson, Mississippi -- a distance of about 200 miles. Because the road is narrow and we'd like to just meander and enjoy the drive, we'd like to take two or three days to drive the 200 miles.

T