Natchez Trace and the Delta

Monday (Nov 5)

In honor of the sun setting at 4:48 tonight, I get myself moving around 10 am instead of 11-12. They have glass recycling! Thanks Federal government! So I drop off my beer bottle collection and drive across the road to the Visitors Center.

The van dashboard clock is my only remaining timepiece that requires manual setting. Leaving the Visitors Center parking lot I was shocked to see that it is TWO hours later than my phone time! A little research shows that last night I returned to the Central Time Zone and didn’t even know it! Explains the mystery of why I got here 40 minutes after what my phone said would be darkness, but it was still daylight: the app was giving me sunset in Central time but I was still driving in Eastern time. Worked in my favor this time.

I doubled back a few miles to experience the gorge – the geological wonder that makes this place a Federal park. The deal is that eastern Tennessee and western VA and northern chunks of GA and ALA are all part of the Cumberland Plateau … all part of the whole Appalachians thing, but instead of mountains being uplifted then eroded, it is a huge flat area being carved into canyons. Like the Colorado Plateau out west I guess. Anyway, I drove back down the 10 mph switchbacks to get to the bridge over the Big South Fork and hung out for a little while. I still can’t walk very far or very well, which I hate.

I am aiming for Jamestown TN, where Yelp says there is a good country breakfast place. Having had good phone bars in the wilds of the National area last night, I got overconfident and messed with my route when I no longer had phone bars. So I got to the Jamestown with no idea WTF anything was. This is getting to be a familiar feeling in these godforsaken hills, and I’m over it. I pulled over an SUV that turned out to be the sheriff while I was driving with one hand and looking at my phone, but fortunately it wasn’t my day to go down – thanks Universe!

Anyway, I pulled over to ask some construction dudes where to eat, and noticed the building right in front of me said “dining room”. It did serve food and I ate it, but it was pretty awful. The waitress was super nice, but the chicken’n dumplings with pinto beans + diced onions and mashed potatoes + brown gravy and cornbread muffin didn’t really make me feel awesome for the rest of the day. The Ten Commandments were inscribed on fake tablets by the door, along with some other creepy Bible verses. I meant to sneak a picture, but forgot on the way out. Definitely made me less at ease not only in the restaurant, but the whole damn town..

It’s four-ish hours to the Meriwether Lewis grave site. My pla had been to take two days to get there. Find a place halfway there tonight, and stay there tomorrow night. But this breakfast clusterfuck experience ended my enthusiasm for the Tennessee hill country. Instead, I’m gonna do an hour or so of even-numbered Interstate west, then an hour or so of odd-numbered Interstate south and just get there tonight on roads where I will get phone reception.  Kind of ironic that I plan an unusually long drive on the first day I lose an hour of daylight, but I am pretty sure that even so I spend less time behind the wheel today than I did being lost in the endless hollows of Kentucky hill country yesterday.

As I skirt the southern suburbs of Nashville nearing I-65 I decide I really need a break, and would like that break to be at a coffee house with wifi, to make up for my desolate experience with breakfast. I had a half caf/half decaf americano in a bizarre little place in Spring Hill TN called The Fainting Goat – really? It was kind of a nice place, another old house converted into a coffee shop, but they were playing the most mind-numbing sappy Christian music imaginable. The barristas were nice enough in that serious Christian kind of way, but the customers seemed a little Stepford-y. I am definitely not cut out for the Bible Belt.

The rush hour traffic was a little stressful, but I was still able to roll into my free federal campground in the woods at exactly 4:30 (Central time :)

Another really, really excellent federal campground. This one is for some reason, totally free of charge. Bathrooms with flush toilets! We are in oak country, so the fall colors are mostly brown, but it’s a lovely brown.  Some leaves still on the trees and the ground covered with a thick layer of oak leaves. It’s quite beautiful.

It’s also quite spacious with level sites, which seems to have attracted a number of huge RVs, some also towing huge trailers.

Tuesday

Still a sweet place in the morning. There was a storm (again) last night that generated tornado warnings. Was not a big deal here I’m happy to say. All the weather disasters do have me a little jumpy though.

It turns out I have entertainment this morning, as my neighbor in his giant bus with giant trailer tries to figure out how to extricate himself from his campsite. Simple to describe – pull forward onto the road, then back up down the Y intersection far enough to turn onto the third leg of the Y, which is the exit. But it took quite awhile, during which I was awash in noise and diesel fumes. Not really so entertaining, I guess.

On the way put I stopped and paid my respects to Captain Lewis at the place of his mysterious demise. He is such an interesting figure – the noblest of humans as he showed time and time and time again on his two-year stress test across the continent. But he was one of those dudes who thinks too much and has debilitating mood swings. Normal life was a bigger challenge to him than trekking across the continent. Here’s to you Meriwether Lewis.

The Natchez Trace is the Relaxation Pose of driving, a serene experience. I broke out after about 25 miles to go to Chad’s Family Restaurant – chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes with brown gravy and the salad bar – hit the spot, and no Bible verses by the door. Since today is a short travel day, I took the turn-off for five miles of the “old Natchez Trace”. This I guess is the original Trace, a one-way narrow gravel road that was really fun to drive. I took a couple of cool videos.

Get back on the road, drive a few more miles and cross Pickwick Lake. I’m going farther south than I need to, because I love driving the Natchez Trace, and thought the lake crossing would be cool. It was. I finally got off at the town of Iuka, MS (love that strange name). I had a tasty breakfast at a tiny little restaurant here six weeks, so for old times sake I pick up an Italian beef sando to go. Turned out to be not that great of an idea. 

It’s 2:30 in the afternoon and I have a decision: arrive at my campground in 20 minutes and spend the rest of the day there hanging out, or drive 45 minutes to Shiloh Battlefield and then drive 30 minutes back to the campground before dark?  I did #2, and it was a fine way to spend the afternoon, but now that I’m here I think it was a fucking stupid decision. I’m paying big money (by my miserly standards) for a spot in a beautiful place. The weather is beautiful which it’s been only about every third day lately, so why didn’t I just go there and chill and do the battlefield tomorrow?  Good question.

Of the battlefields I’ve visited, Shiloh is a gut punch every time. It’s the monuments everywhere, in thefields, in the woods, everywhere. And each monument represents a town in Ohio or Vermont or Arkansas wher most of the town’s kids who marched off to war didn’t come home, but instead cahsed it on right at this fenpoet in 1863.

As I say, the campground is very pleasant, weather is still and perfect.

I get good phone reception, so I settle in for night of monitoring the Blue Wave election. It was very upsetting that night,

Wednesday

It stormed again last night. It’s a cold and gloomy morning, which fits my cold and gloomy mood. I know winning control of the house is a BFD, but damn I wanted Beto/Abrams/Gillum to win. I was a victim of the election night narrative that it wasn’t a blue wave, but of course two weeks later we know it was. But I am pretty low energy today.

The weather does make me feel better that I stopped to the Battlefield yesterday. It would not have been very pleasant today.

I lazed around until noonish then headed west to a great place in Corinth – the Pizza Factory. Really stupid name, but a cool place. A big ole red brick building that was derelict for years, then rehabbed in 2000. Whatever that was didn’t work out, so new folks have taken it over and put a coffee house on the upper level in one half, and a pretty nice restaurant on the lower level in the other half. I got a lot of stuff. Coffee+cinnamon roll = $6, then think for a minute and order an arugula salad to go and a crawfish po’ boy for here. Awesome! Corinth was a key strategic railroad crossing back in the day, and was basically why Shiloh was fought where it was. There was another battle here a few weeks later that cemented the South’s loss and opened the way for Sherman’s March.

I think my aging brain may have blown a small fuse in my direction finder. I got on US 25 and am cruising happily along for 12 miles until I saw a billboard for beautiful Iuka MS, and thought WTF, that’s where I came from, why is that sign here? Maps is in Directions mode, and sure enough the minutes/miles to my destination were indeed greater than they were when I left. So yes, I have pissed away something like a 25 miles of gas and 30 minutes of daylight. And yes, I am going to be finding a campsite in the dark AGAIN. I am pissed.

I retrace my steps, BACK through Corinth, get off the highway at nicely named Holly Springs MS and follow a county road into the deepening gloom.

This a kind of spooky, mostly deserted place, but in a way, that made it easier, to just wander around in the dark, not worrying if my headlights were disturbing a campfire. Nobody else seems to worry about that, but I hate it when I’m sitting in the dark and I get raked by headlights, I assume others do also?!?

There are two loops, one has a half dozen campers and a bathroom with lights bright enough for a prison farm. The other loop is deserted and completely dark. Guess which one I chose.

I get just enough phone reception to do stuff … slowly. Anyway, I looked it up and this is the new moon, which means that starting tomorrow a little sliver of moon will appear on the western horizon at sunset, and the next two weeks will be a waxing moon, my favorite half of the cycle!

Thursday

This place is really pretty and not at all shabby in the morning. Those super bright lights at the bathroom are a bad look, like a minimum security prison. My guess is they have vandalism problems.

Downtown Oxford MS was as classic a college town as you could ask for. Even though it’s a bastion of everything I dislike about the Old South, I really liked it. The college town coffee shop was everything I hoped for. I put a couple more dollars in the meter and wandered the downtown for a while (my leg feels better). Doug said there was a cool bookstore here. It was pretty cool, so successful that it had taken over three different storefronts on and around the square. The square is a classic town square with the old courthouse in the middle. The neighborhood is very hilly, so a block off the square you might be dropping down 30 feet.