Day 17 – April 20

The combination wi-fi connection and laundry facilities allowed us to get caught up with our e-mail and blog and empty our dirty laundry bag. One last minute load of laundry in the morning and by 10:00 we were off again. We weren’t far from the Natchez Trace Parkway so we were soon heading south again. We decided that it was time for the ‘women folk’ to try their hand at handling the rigs so Diane and Jane took over driving responsibilities while Ike and I navigated. As the only instructions were to head south it was not an onerous task for us.

The Trace, although narrow, so far had not been heavily trafficked, commercial vehicles are banned, and the road was in great condition so it was a good place for Jane and Diane to get a feel for the extra width of these vehicles. The BRT in particular, with its wider rear dual wheels takes some getting used to, especially when trying to ease over to make way for large oncoming vehicles. Like colouring books, it’s important to stay between the lines especially when sharing the road with one of those greyhound bus sized RV’s that block out the sun and have enough mass to effect tidal patterns.

The day was quite uneventfully, with a couple of stops to take short hikes to some sites of interest, an unknown confederate soldier burial ground with 13 headstones and a First Nations’ burial mound site. We found a nice picnic park to eat the sandwiches that Diane and Jane had prepared that morning.

Confederate Soldier Burial Site

Burial Mounds

We passed through an area that had been hit by a tornado in April of 2011. It looked like some of the forests at home after Hurricane Juan. It made me a little more conscious of those high wind warnings we heard a couple of days earlier.

Tornado row from the LRT

There were two remaining campgrounds on the Trace but one wasn’t far enough along and the other was too far to get to before dark so we went of the Trace to the Roosevelt State Park near Morton to spend the night.

After a supper of wok fries we sat around a fire just to get that smokey flavour fully into all of our now clean clothes. We haven’t had a fire for quite a while and I have been carrying a bundle of wood that we bought about 6 states ago that I was very pleased to divest myself of.