Wednesday, October 5, 2011

An easy day at Joe Wheeler State Park

We took an hour-long walk, cleaned the shower and air conditioner sump, washed sheets and towels, sunbathed, reassigned a shelf as our spice cabinet.  It's a beautiful day after a couple of chilly ones.  Not much happening here-a terrific day.

A couple of things not mentioned earlier:

In our first entry in this blog, we only covered half the trip in our overview.  After Mobile Bay, we will cruise on the intracoastal waterway along the Florida panhandle, then across the Gulf of Mexico to the Keys.  We'll spend 1 or 2 months at Boca Chica Key (two keys up from Key West) then start north along the Atlantic Intracoastal.  We'll move into the Hudson River, traverse parts of the New York Canal System, cross Lake Ontario then move into Canadian waters of Lake Huron and back home to Mackinaw City.  We plan to take about a year.


We have seen LOTS of Bass boats since Pickwick Lake.  The trees behind this boat are on a hill across from the lodge (and our boat).  We've been watching the fall colors approach day by day. Most of the boat launches we've seen since leaving the great lakes do not have docks.  Boaters have to get into the water to launch and recover their boats.  At Florence we saw a technique for getting a boat off the trailer that we have never seen before-in spite of having a great view of the boat launch at Mackinaw City from our slip (we have seen many interesting incidents, but that's a story for another day). A man backed his trailer into the water, then got into the boat to drive it off.  It was not cooperating so he rhythmically banged his body against the back of his seat until the boat slipped off.

Our boat in front of the lodge at Joe Wheeler State Park:


Naked man at mile marker 180.  As we were cruising on the Tennessee River, John asked, "Is that a statue up there?"  We were in an area with high, steep banks and Mary looked up to see someone standing at the top, silhouetted against the sky.  "No, John, that's not a statue."  Wearing only binoculars, he scanned the river.  There are many things we expect to see on this trip and we know there will be some surprises (like armadillo roadkill by Clifton, TN-we didn't know they lived this far north), but this was nowhere even in the  periphery of our imaginings.

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