Happy Birthday, Happy Anniversary, and Florence , Alabama

Today (Thursday, 9/22) is Mary's birthday.  Jane and Larry from Bavarian Cream had a party for her birthday and our anniversary last night.  John gave her Kindle books she's been coveting.  Matthew, Christine, Benj, and Sarah sent her 3 dvd's-Oklahoma, South Pacific, and The Dark Crystal.  Poor John will have to forego Northern Exposure for the next few nights.  There were e-mail greetings from Jackie and Jo (John's sisters), and a gift is waiting at home from her friend Jo in California.  Her sister, Theresa, sent her a text but since we don't pay for that service, we didn't find out until we talked to her on the phone a bit later. We will move from Clifton Marina today to Florence, AL, so John can take her out for a birthday dinner.

Clifton is a charming little town.  We managed to ride our bikes 6 1/2 miles, but there is only about 1 mile of sidewalk and only a few side streets, so we didn't manage our usual 10 mile ride.  General Nathan Bedford Forrest crossed the Tennessee River here and Pulitzer Prize winning author Thomas Stribling lived here.  His home is now the public library.  We had an all-night and all-day rain on Tuesday.  The captain of Satin Doll made a chocolate cake/marshmallow desert IN HER CROCK POT and we celebrated Jolly Tolly's loop finish.  The next day, there was almost as much water in Patches as there was when Matthew and Christine got married on Mackinac Island.

We picked up a hitchhiker when we were leaving Clifton, unfortunately he decided to get off at the gas dock.  If he was a little bigger and could make a dent in the spider population, we'd keep him.

This part of the Tennessee River is beautiful with high stone walls.

We found an interesting way to keep goats on the Tennessee River, you put them on an island, that way you don't need fences.

We passed Pittsburg Landing, where the battle of Shiloh was fought on April 6 and 7, 1862, between the armies of General Grant and General Johnson.  It was a great slaughter with 23,000 casualties for the Northern and Southern Armies.   (No helicopters in 1862)

We net a young man at Clifton who is doing the loop in a kayak, he left a couple of days ahead of us and we caught up with him 40 miles up the river,

We ran 100 miles to Florence Alabama today, the weather was perfect, this is the best day we have had on the river.  It was in the low 80's with no wind and the water was flat all day.  We went through the Pickwick lock, another 50 foot raise, and went into Pickwick Lake.  The lake is 55 miles long and is beautiful. This lock has a highway bridge directly overhead.

We arrived at the Florence Marina about 4:30, got our dock, and went out to dinner to celebrate Mary's birthday.  The restaurant had a live band and the food was fine.  While we were there a boat came in and had a tough time docking, when we got back to our boat we could see that it had lots of damage.  It looked like he went under something that was too low.  We were told later that tornado-damaged boats had just been released for repair by insurance inspectors, so maybe....

Here's our boat in Florence.  Brandy and Boreas came in the day after we did and Bavarian Cream the next day.

We had read about this project in a magazine about the rivers.  If you have an extra half-million lying around, you can buy into it and spend the rest of your days cruising the US rivers in your own condo stateroom.  Oh, yeah, monthly condo fees are only $1,200.00.

Today we went to see Alabama's only house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.  Our guide had actually been a caretaker at the house, so the tour was especially personal. We borrowed the marina's courtesy van and, yes, the check engine light is on.  You can certainly see his influence on his student, Alden Dow, in some of the houses Dow designed in Midland.