When does the South get Deep?

Thursday (Sep 27)

It rained much of the night, and was still raining hard this morning. Even though I knew the forecast I did not bring in all my stuff before bedtime. That was stupid. I did wake up at the first pitter-patters, but it started hard!  Now I have a wet basketball, my tool-tub has 1/4″ of water in the bottom, and wet towels and clothes strewn all over the van, trying to dry out in the 90% humidity.

Lunch was a huge catfish dinner at Boyettes. Should have gotten the two piece option rather than the three piece. Ate way too much. Love this “white beans or green beans” thing.

From there straight to the State Park Visitors Center, to get the word education on the earthquakes. I am VERY disappointed to say that it was closed for an upgrade. Bummer. I was looking forward to exhibits in the New Madrid Fault and the big earthquake. I googled this “upgrade”, and it turns out to be a real shitshow – “state officials plan to tear down the unfinished Reelfoot Lake visitors center — a facility showcasing a landscape transformed by powerful earthquakes — because it wasn’t built to seismic standards.” Who says irony is dead?

I drove around the edge of the lake for a while, then headed away from this magical spot, so Louisiana bayou-like. The countryside is very flat and cotton fields for much of the day. Towards the end of the day, nearing Shiloh and the Tennessee River it got swampy again. The Tennessee River plays a big part in the story of Shiloh, and its Pickwick Dam, my destination, is only about 30 miles away.

Towards the end of that thirty miles I drive past a gigantic, really, really smelly paper plant. I am of course thinking: “god I hope I can’t smell THAT at the campground!” Spoiler alert: I can’t, but it’s smoke are fire are visible day and night from there, like having the mouth of Hell right over the next hill.

There are two campgrounds here. On the lake, on the south side of the dam is a State Park. Just another state camping experience on a lake –  boring!

Catty-corner across the dam, that is at the bottom of the dam on the north side, is an TVA campground. It looked more interesting, and it was! It’s spacious, with huge, level, well-engineered sites designed with top-down control in mind, just like an Army Corps campground. But the super-interesting feature is that the dam has locks, and huge quarter-mile long barges go through it, and I can watch those barges from bed in the morning when I open up the van door. I didn’t get there early enough to really enjoy the place – take a walk up to the foot of the dam for instance, but just walking across the road to the boat ramp and watching the barges and the aforementioned paper mill’s smoke stacks belching thick, spot-lit smoke was pretty cool.

Friday – Sunday

It is very pleasant here in the morning. As mentioned above, the camp host hooked my up with a great spot for watching the barges pop out of the locks and float on down the river. On a normal day I would’ve enjoyed their shower, but today I will be at an actual house (condo) in an actual bedroom, so I can enjoyed a real shower tonight.

My first time in a person’s home since I left Martha’s 38 days ago! I’m pretty excited! Do a laundry! Wifi all day! Backup my iPhone! Hang out on a sofa and do nothing! I can’t wait!

But first, I have to get there. The drive out of the downriver area is quite interesting.  In the map inset above, I am on the upper side of the river driving rightward past a parking area where I took the pic to the right. Then up the hill to cross the dam and try to look at the locks while I am driving, then onward across the Mississippi state line a a beeline to Starkville.

As I complain pretty often, food options are often not awesome around here, but this morning I took a chance on an odd little place that was very memorable … in a good way! Donna’s Italian Beef was such an itty-bitty building that I couldn’t process it as a sit-down restaurant at first, but it was! It seems bigger inside! :) It was odd to find a place whose speciality was Italian beef in the obscure little town of Iuka, MS, but here it is. I had my Italian beef with scrambled eggs, and it was very good. My nerves were a little on edge, because the other customers were farmers and truck drivers and equipment workers, and in my plaid shorts and tee I was pretty clearly not from around here. But the waitress was nice and everybody went about their business.

I’m still at least a couple of hours from Starkville. I headed south through the beautifully named town of Tishomongo and picked up the Natchez Trace Parkway. The Parkway is beautiful and very relaxing to drive. I stopped and stared at some Indian mounds, and walked a few hundred feet up a piece of the original trail. The trail was a big deal before railroads and steam engines. Back in the day, if you lived in Pittsburg or Cincinnatti or Louisville and got a job on a riverboat, you would do your thing on the boat until it got to New Orleans, then … if you wanted to see home again you bought a horse if you could afford it, if not you just walked … all the way back. The Natchez Trace was the superhighway for getting back home from New Orleans.

I only drove it for 50-ish miles, and got off in Tupelo. I needed a break, so I got a decaf americano at Strange Brew in Tupelo (wifi password “brewpelo” :) No, I did NOT make a pilgrimage to the Elvis Museum. I guess there really is a lot of American musical history around here –  I was 50 miles from Muscle Shoals earlier today.

I get to Starkville around 5:30. Doug has just left for his first gig of the night. I miscommunicated with Terry so that I wandered cluelessly through the narrow streets of Starkville for fifteen minutes, but soon enough my van was tucked away safely off the street in their condo parking lot, and Terry and I were catching up and drinking wine – woo!

As luck would have it, this is the biggest football weekend party night of the fall! All of the fraternity end of the edge of campus was basically cordoned off to be one big street party. Doug’s second gig is to be the OG saxophonist in a band of kids playing what I guess I would call indie-folk. The core was drums/bass/guitar/guitar-vocals. In addition there was keyboard, congas two singers, and I think someone else I can’t remember. In my opinion the music would’ve been about the same without the whole second crew, but hey, friends get to play together in a band, so why don’t I just shut up. They were a fun dance band. It was very crowded, lines at every bathroom were endless.

The craziest part was we ended up walking – about 5.5 miles round-trip. We were drinking, and neither one of us really wanted to drive, but I was gonna. But thennwe got a little baked, and that was a little too much risk for me, so we walked out the door and jsut started hoofing it south on N Montgomery St to a left on University, through more and more students who were more and more drunk … until we go to the spot. It was crazy crowded, so we stood or in my case did that thing I call dancing, for about two hours and walked back, through 1/2 mile of even drunker students. Having walked through them, we assumed every car had a driver that would fail the sobriety test, so it was Safety First! all the way home.

Saturday

The day after a 6ix mile hike is a great day to veg out! Doug is into his Giants baseball and Mississippi State football, so he watches those games on his computer while I do this on mine … and kinda watch games. They both lost in rather depressing fashion,. It wasn’t a good sports day, but we had fun otherwise. Later that night I watched the Warriors play their first preseason game, and they lost that. So it was a really pleasant, restorative day with a lot of sports-losing.

Sunday

I got it in my head that I want to see the Niners play game 4 of their benighted season. Doug that would be a good piece of Bay Area nostalgia, so he and I headed off to the Buffalo Wild Wings (BWW) which Doug called something like “B double-dub”. It was exactly the national chain restaurant you’d expect, and at the same time a quintessentially southern experience. The former was the 20 TVs and the noise and the sports bar vibe. The latter was the our waiter, who had this nice way about him that was deep-southern.

Monday

Hanging out in their spare bedroom is very comfortable, but time to hit it. They both had to go to work (I remember those days …) so I decided to find the coolests coffee shop I could on the way out of town. Doug hooked me up with 929 Coffee Bar. It was in old downtown, not the fraternity row part I walked through. Just my kind of place.

In the course of lining up my aids for the next few days I found that I don’t have a map of Alabama! I find that there is an AAA office in Tuscaloosa right on my route, US 82. So that is my next destination when I’m done at the ole 929. I have a list of 6 other maps that I wish to upgrade from the 2010 versions I have. I figure I pay those folks $85/year, they can certainly update my maps every eight years. She found the maps for me, but in every other respect the place was really disappointing. Since it’s only a couple hundred miles away, I was hoping they could give me some information on road conditions traveling up the Atlantic coast two weeks after Hurricane Florence. The lady had absolutely no clue. Nowadays, AAA offices are pretty useless as travel information centers.

I think I have a bad attitude on the whole Crimson Tide experience. I found a place in the fancy suburbs called Urban Cookhouse, The food was ok, but the servers were kinda sucky. Onward and out of there.

I could’ve found yet another Army or State campground on a lake but decided to try this funky little State Historical Park. It was a good try, but it was very hot and humid:

Thank goodness almost all these southern campgrounds have showers, because you damn well need one after the exertion of walking from the van to the picnic table. I took a short sunset walk to take in the sights. The sights were: a nice house they rent out for weddings, a 150 year old church that a local charity restored, another old house … and a baseball field. I entertained myself by watching the mist rise off the grass. The long term residents of the campground included at least one weirdo, a woman with an unleashed German shepherd burning construction waste in her fire pit. Sometimes I think the last words I’ll hear on earth are “oh, she’s friendly, she never bites” as a huge beast bounds up to me.

I’m getting used to the heat, the van cools off real nicely with the fan and the vents … after a cold shower.