It was our last day in Tupelo so we did all the last day stuff like stocking up on groceries and liquor. With the exception of about an hour yesterday, we have been in Mississippi for the last two weeks. We have driven the Natchez Trace from milepost 0 in Natchez up to about milepost 330 at the south side of the Tennessee River in Alabama. We have passed by magnificent buildings, beautiful countryside, plantations, a military park, interesting landmarks and met many very friendly folks. We did not discuss religion or politics with any of them. We have witnessed lightning and thunder that almost made some of my poo come out. We have witnessed rain associated with severe thunderstorms that seemed almost biblical in nature. It has been interesting.
In the morning we depart for Tennessee. One of the reasons we stocked up on booze here in Tupelo is the whimsical liquor laws in our next state. Some counties have liquor sales. Some do not. Sunday is right out for drunks caught short. Distilleries abound. It is truly a unique and bizarre arrangement.

Today we diverted a bit from the Trace by following the Tombigbee River from Fulton north on the river’s east bank. The Tombigbee was substantially altered from its original configuration when the Army Corps of Engineers connected it with the Tennessee River up in the northwest corner of Alabama. They built locks, dams, bridges, made massive cuts through limestone rock, put up visitor centers and campgrounds and had an all-around good time starting back in the late 1970’s. It was a massive project with a length of some 240 miles and allowing barge traffic to leave the Tennessee River and take a shortcut to Mobile Bay in two days. The other option is down the Tennessee to the Ohio to the Mississippi to New Orleans – about 1000 or more miles further.
We followed the Tombigbee all the way up to Tishomingo. Today was different from our other days near the Trace – we spotted lots of turtles, a good assortment of wading birds and a green heron, another addition to our bird book. We were on the John Rankin Highway all the way up to Tishomingo State Park which is a beautiful gem in the northeast corner of Mississippi. The park has a venerable swinging pedestrian bridge over a river, wild pink azaleas, abundant dogwoods in bloom and lots of neat buildings and improvements made back in the make-work days of the CCC.
We headed out of the state park and continued on the Trace up to the Tennessee River in Alabama at about milepost 330. The Tennessee River is huge. I had no idea it was even a river until I learned better recently and I was impressed at its width. It looks like it is maybe 1/2 mile across where the Trace passes over it. We will pick up our travel on the Trace later in this trip but we are going away from it for a while so we can explore in western Tennessee a bit.
Before heading home today we decided to find some grub to eat before the long drive back to Tupelo. The restaurants in the town of Cherokee didn’t look too famous so we went to a supermarket called a Piggly Wiggly for lunch makings. Their lunch meats and cheese were okay but their chocolate chip cookies had a list of ingredients longer than War and Peace.
There’s some pictures. Click here

We got up this morning fully intending to eat breakfast in our Barbarian Invader but we ended up voting, 2 – 0, to instead go to a local bakery called Crave in downtown Tupelo. According to the internet, Crave has been the recipient of many awards for their pastries and, based on the bacon biscuit and ham and chive scone we had for our morning meals, the awards went to the right folks. We were also undisciplined because we also got something called a skillet cookie which was very tasty and surely very bad for our health. It is a big (8”?) cookie in a ceramic pan with ice cream, chocolate and caramel drizzled over the top.
Across the street from Crave is the Tupelo courthouse and out in front there is a statue with a marble woman in a toga on a pedestal emblazoned with a plaque to temperance and the 1903 complete prohibition of alcohol in Tupelo. The statue has had her right hand lopped off, probably due to her views about drinking. Serves her right.
We then stopped in at Tupelo Hardware to purchase a replacement room heater for our trailer because the old heater made a funny noise and quit. According to the salesman who provided service to us, Elvis got his first guitar in Tupelo Hardware but there seems to be some confusion about what happened. According to our salesman, there was a long sequence of bikes, rifles, guitars, poverty and, surprisingly, explosive diarrhea involved in the mystery of the guitar. When Elvis was alive I saw many recordings of his performances and, although I saw him swing a guitar around and dance about with a guitar, I never saw him play one. When I mentioned to the salesman that it was unfortunate that such a stellar performer would end up croaking on the crapper with a hit of Dilaudid hanging out of his arm, he gave me a funny look. Not long after hearing the extended Elvis and the Tupelo Hardware guitar stories, we drove a few blocks to Elvis’s boyhood home which was quite small, but tidy.
The remainder of the day we spent traversing the section of the Natchez Trace between Jeff Busby at about milepost 195 up to Tupelo which must be at around milepost 260. A good portion of the Trace in this section passes within the confines of the Tombigbee National Forest. It is a bit higher than the Trace south of Jeff Busby but the wildflowers alongside the road are still spectacular. The dogwoods are blooming and they are gorgeous. We have not seen a lot of animals along the Trace, except birds, to date. Weird.
Check out today’s pictures. Click here

Today was a travel day and we were happy to wake up this morning with all our stuff intact. After the dreadful weather yesterday and last night, we were delighted to arise and find merely overcast skies with only some stiff breezes and no rain. We were on our way out of Lake Tardicaca and headed north at 11:00 AM. We did dawdle a bit in the trailer this morning, drinking coffee and waiting for the outside temperature to rise out of the 30’s before venturing outside.
We mostly followed MS-25 for a while, headed northwest but soon ended up on a bunch of different roads on our way to Tupelo. We pulled into the Campground at Barnes Crossing, just north of Elvis’s birthplace. The campground has full hookups, wifi and maybe the best space utilization I have ever seen on a sidehill RV park. There are many retaining walls. There are also numerous birds.

Yesterday was supposed to be our last full day in Louisville, MS, but we made a plan change due to being cowards about the weather. We were monitoring the Weather Underground on the phone and it indicated severe thunderstorms and tornadoes would plague any travel today, at least in eastern Mississippi. We extended our stay here one day by contacting the desk. We also contacted them about where we could hunker up and kiss our asses goodbye should a tornado make a local appearance. We passed through a section of the local Tombigbee National Forest a few days ago where a tornado had made a pass through standing timber. It looked like a giant set of Pick-Up Sticks. We made a pass into town to stock up on supplies yesterday.
Starting this morning, the advance of the thunderstorms crossed our location and the buggers were open for business. There was no pansy drizzle to announce the advent of worse weather. It started out raining hard and kept at it for about 6 hours. Lightning flashed. Thunder cracked and rumbled. Fortunately, any tornadoes went elsewhere so the trailer is still where we parked it.
We got cozy inside the trailer and stayed there while it raged outside. Our trailer (and probably all other trailers) have inherent weaknesses in their cheezy construction. Our trailer, for instance, has a grate outside where the refrigerator is vented and, if the grate faces into the prevailing wind when it is raining, a small trickle of water ends up crossing our floor emanating from the back of the fridge enclosure. Here in Louisville, though, we must have parked in the correct orientation because it rained like a bastard and we were dry as a bone. I imagine the new trailer roof we got in San Antonio might have helped, too.
We’ll be on our way tomorrow.
There’s pix of Louisville from yesterday and the gullying behind our trailer today if you click here

Yesterday one of us had an exciting day and both of us had a great time exploring on the Natchez Trace. We had blown off our chores and fooled around instead.
Today we were finally forced into doing the laundry since the clothes hamper was starting to look like an ordinary pyramid. There is no laundry facility here at Lake Tardicaca so we took six bags of stuff to nearby Louisville and checked into the Soap-N-Suds. We took over a whole bank of machines. It was pretty dull. They have a good laundromat in Louisville.

It was our intention to drive into nearby Louisville today to do the laundry but we discussed it and about 5 seconds later we had decided on a different agenda not involving a laundromat. Instead, we chose to drive down to the office/restaurant here at Lake Tardicaca and try their lunch buffet. It only cost $9.95 a head and the food was very tasty.
After that, we found our way to MS-25 where we intended to go back onto the Natchez Trace south of Kosciusco. On many highways here, we have spotted sullen young men wearing pants with wide horizontal stripes and high visibility garments picking up the roadside trash and most of the roads we have been on in Mississippi have had pristine shoulders they are gorgeous. Unfortunately, not 40 minutes after leaving the restaurant I noticed extremely uncomfortable peristalsis activity in my abdomen and almost immediately realized I urgently needed a restroom. Maybe the restaurant food at Lake Tardicaca Resort was not as good as I thought. Mississippi countryside is mostly rural with slender two-lane roads without pullouts, wide grass shoulders, very few communities and even fewer roadside restrooms. The only turnouts are driveways to roadside residences. It was too far to Kosciusco where we knew there was a john. I began to search frantically for alternatives.
Fortunately for me, Mississippi terrain is mostly gently rolling hills arranged in such a way that large sections of the numerous roadside graveyards are not visible from the road. I skidded to a stop next to one of them and hopped out of the car taking some tissues my devoted spouse thrust at me on the way out the door. I made a stiff-legged walk down the slight grade to a likely looking headstone that I could grasp while I solved my now frantic intestinal issue. I was all ready to go on some poor cracker’s head with my trousers around my ankles and commencing to crouch when, due to the reaction load on the headstone, the top half of the monument started to slide at me so far that it was going to slip right off the little marble plinth supporting it. I was in a quandary. I was going to crap whether I intended to or not but I was suddenly presented with a big marble slab being balanced on the plinth edge, prevented from tumbling down the hill by my grasp, my pants were down and footwork was tricky. After a Herculean effort to get the big slab of stone back where it belonged, I quickly picked another cracker’s head on which to unload. I did not look to see who the unfortunate deceased victim was. I felt a bit bad about it but in reality I was more worried somebody would spot me desecrating graves, call the local parish sheriff and I would be trying to explain the situation. Therefore, I finished my heinous activity and made a hasty retreat.
We eventually made it down to milepost 135 on the Trace which is as far as we had gone north from milepost 0 in Natchez. The Trace at this time of year is liberally bordered with fields of wildflowers. We spotted some wild turkeys, some great blue herons and two little blue herons (we’ve only seen one of them before) on our passage north today. The Trace here is slowly rising in elevation and the dogwoods north of Kosciusco are blooming along the highway, complementing the roadside wildflowers with brilliant white treeflowers.
We pulled off the Trace at French Camp, part museum and part little town. They have some great old buildings here from the early 1800’s and some really nice houses for the residents. The old buildings looked like they were chilly in winter.
We continued up the Trace to a place called Jeff Busby, where one can drive up to the second-highest place in Mississippi at 602 feet. It is the first time since we left central Texas where we could see further than the next curve in the road due to Mississippi’s mostly flat, poor-draining terrain and abundant trees.
At Jeff Busby we left the Trace and took the return drive to Louisville, maybe 25 miles. On this section of road, it was plainly evident that the sullen men in the striped attire had not been here yet.
Got some pix, Click here

Today was another travel day and that is probably fortunate. Our campsite at LaFleur State Park was considerably closer to the lake’s edge than it was last night. Apparently, the operators of the dam holding back the Ross Barnett Reservoir upstream were obliged to up the flow exiting the lake from 18,000 to 21,000 cubic feet per second and, therefore, all the folks in the campground’s low spots close to the water were forced to move to higher ground or flee. When we left, about half of the individual camping spots were abandoned and awash.
Right out of the campground we turned east on MS-25 and followed it all the way to Louisville. MS, not Louisville, KY. The first 50 miles or so passed through soggy or swampy land but by the time we got into the second half of today’s drive we were zinging through gently rolling hills with gorgeous roadside timber and truly rotten paving. The paving patches installed in numerous locations along the way were even worse than the original substandard asphalt and had to be scrupulously avoided in order to keep our Barbarian Invader’s silverware drawer from emptying its contents into the ceiling of our fifth wheel trailer.
After a very serpentine trip, we pulled into Lake Tardicaca….no…strike that…Lake Tiak-O’Khata Resort’s RV campground. It is a rough-looking joint with little flat land or rudimentary paving but they do have full hookups and lightning-fast wifi. There are lots of birds which is okay with me. We will know more tomorrow.
We got some shots showing the rising water in the campground and a woodpecker. Click here

Our exploration today was into Jackson, our current camping location and the state capitol. Again we had our best glimpse of wildlife right in our campground. So far at the campground, we have added two new birds to our list of sightings; a true red-headed woodpecker and a yellow crowned night heron who was quite impressive looking. There are lots of turtles.
Our intent in going downtown was to check out the architecture which was widely varied and very pretty. We started at the house of a Pulitzer prize-winning author named Eudora Welty. I have never read any of her books and Peggy has read one called The Optimist’s Daughter which she described as “sad.” Nevertheless, Eudora had a very nice house, as did many of her neighbors. We also checked out the Governor’s Mansion and the state capitol building and they were impressive, as well.
I am surprised that anyone drives downtown since, as far as I can recollect, Jackson has absolutely the most terrible roads of anyplace we have driven in the last four years or maybe ever. A quick scan of the internet indicates that some years back a government engineer stated that Jackson’s roads had less than four years of viable use remaining. Now they have reached the zero point and motorists are cautioned to drive a rental car when visiting because that way you can wreck a car you don’t own.
See today’s photos by clicking here

Our tour for today took us up the next increment of the Natchez Trace, specifically from the Mississippi town of Raymond up to MS-16 near Farmhaven. We had to drive a bit to get to Raymond and, as we left our campground at LaFleur Bluff SP, we spotted alligators, turtles, a red-headed woodpecker, a great blue heron and two snowy egrets before we even got to the entry kiosk.
We started by driving a couple miles off the Trace into Raymond where there was a Civil War battle between U.S. Grant and a Confederate general named Pemberton. The battlefield is an almost dead-flat cornfield and Pemberton, who was pitifully understaffed, got his ass kicked. These two generals were to meet again less than a month later when the siege at Vicksburg occurred starting in May, 1863. Raymond has some nice architecture downtown but for even better stuff we headed north up the Trace to Clinton. The locals there have taken old bicycles and converted them into public art sculptures sprinkled around the downtown area.
Our next stop, for lunch, was at Ross Barnett Reservoir, a dammed section of the Pearl River. It is a beautiful lake and the local folks seem to have a great time there playing with their dogs, picnicking, fishing and boating. There are gators in the Pearl so I don’t know if anybody swims in the reservoir. From the reservoir, we continued up the beautiful Trace through the Yackanookany (no kidding) section where we started to pass through cypress and tupelo swamp which was very pretty although it is difficult to make the distinction between sky and water since the reflection of the forest is perfect in the calm water.
Late in the day we finally made it to MS-16 where we turned southwest to Canton where they have a very pretty downtown and a gigantic Nissan auto assembly plant. Soon after passing through town, we got on I-55 for our drive back to Jackson and LaFleur State Park for another night’s stay.
See pictures. Click here