 SATURDAY |
TRAVEL DAY |
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This is not the busy season for the Natchez Trace Parkway, so most of the parking lots are near empty when we arrive at a highlighted stop. Some of the stops are mere pullouts along the side of the roadway and it's easy to see if there is enough space to park THE POD and then get back on the road. Others have a short quarter mile driveway that leads to a parking lot that's usually not visible from the road. These make me a little more nervous about taking a 50 foot long truck and trailer combination somewhere that I may or may not have the ability to turn around and exit from.
Fortunately the National Park Service is pretty good about putting up signs warning RVers when the parking lot is not accessible to them. I still worry just a little, what if the sign got knocked down by some RVer who didn't heed the warning while trying to reverse out of a bad situation? It's one thing to back down into a 60 foot long campsite, it's something entirely different to try and back down a quarter mile roadway with twists and turn in it!
Putting all that aside we did stop to see five different points of interest between stops today. The Bynum Mounds, Chickasaw Village Site, a Parkway Visitor Center, Confederate Soldiers Gravesites and Pharr Mounds were all worth the stop and gave us more insight as to what life was like here on The Trace, sometimes thousands of years ago. By the way, the new cover photo on the TWO PEAS AND THE POD Facebook Group was taken while we were visiting the Confederate Soldiers Gravesites location.
I'll show you photos of everything when I do a post all about The Natchez Trace Parkway later this month.
 SUNDAY |
GROCERY SHOPPING DAY |
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It's Sunday morning and after breakfast I decide I'll go grocery shopping while Tricia is finishing up her work for the month. At our next stop I doubt there will be any groceries nearby so it's important I get a few essentials before we leave here. We make a short list of items, mostly produce and diary, then I Googled "groceries nearby" and nothing to promising came up. There were a couple mom and pop markets in the nearby town of Tishomingo and that's about it. I set out with high hopes of locating everything on the list.
Three miles down the road I arrive at the nearest market to the campground and find out they're closed on Sunday and the second one, which is around the corner from the first, opens at noon on Sunday. It's only 10:00am and while I'm parked outside the second market and trying to Google the next nearest option a middle aged couple pulls up next to me and I think to myself, I'm not the only one foolishly looking for groceries this morning in this little town.
Turns out they're locals who just stopped by to get some firewood from the sidewalk outside of the store. It's $5 for a small bundle, $10 for 3 bundles, and a small sign instructing you to just put the money in the mail slot on the front door of the store. I wonder how much wood just simply disappears, there are no cameras I see anywhere in sight. I roll down my passenger window and ask where I might be able to purchase groceries this morning.
He tells me the Dollar General Store on the other side on town, a mile away, sells groceries. I explain I'm looking for fresh produce and that's when his wife gets out of the car to aid in the search. He's telling me about a store 15 miles north of Tishomingo that might have what I'm looking for and she says they don't have anything like that. She says I need to go to the Walmart Supercenter 24 miles in the opposite direction to find what I'm looking for.
That's how I ended up traveling 54 miles round trip this morning just to get groceries, and now of course, gasoline!
 MONDAY |
SIGHTSEEING DAY |
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Next was a visit to the historic site of Colbert Ferry where The Trace crosses the Tennessee River. Wasn't much here to see except beautiful scenery and a few informational signs of what once stood here.
Next we headed back to the campground for some lunch and then we explored a two mile hike right in Tishomingo State Park where we were staying. The highlight of this hike is the Swinging Bridge that crosses Bear Creek. The trail starts and ends at the bridge so you get to cross over it twice. Along this trail, named the Outcroppings Trail, we saw many large cave openings in the rock faces where Chickasaw Indians were to believe to have lived.
With these two short hikes, and another short hike we did last week around the creek at Rocky Springs Campground, I'm finally ready to post an update regarding our 2019 Hiking Challenge me made for ourselves this year. It's not much but we now have 3 miles towards our goal of 100 miles before the year is up. Let's hope we make our goal!
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100 MILE |
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Who will be the first to correctly guess our next location?
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