These random thoughts are in no particular order of travel or importance.
• Most beautiful rest stop on the Interstate beside Rend Lake
• The magnificent fragrance of blooming flowers and bushes in a Tupelo hotel parking lot.
• Never know what intresting sights you'll see at Natchez Trace rest stops. The first of several was near the northern end of the Natchez Trace where emerging from a nature trail through the woods suddenly appeared a gaggle of giggling postulates, dressed all in white.
• Peaceful, quiet woods, streams, hills and dales where once booming cannons caused carnage - Shiloh
• The sound made by raining leaves and pine straw hitting the car windshield
• Old oak trees
• Sleeping dogs
• The amazing beauty of cold steel cannons set among the colors of fall
• Park Rangers going out of their way
• Cloudy day, old barn in field with roof caved in – would be beautiful picture with sun streaming into the interior
• Cornith, Mississippi - not what I expected. It definitely was not the small
rural town of my imagination. I was expecting old Hobgood or Scotland Neck - two of my favorite towns from travels through rural NC on our way to
Morehead City
• Open fields and vistas stretching as far as the eye can see
• Trains across the fields look like model railroads
• A quiet so loud that only the leaves blowing in the wind and the call of birds is heard
• Eagles soaring and cannons standing guard over the Tennessee River at Ft. Donelson
• Politics – clutters our highways and airways
• Hawks soaring overhead
• The nostalgic sound of a train-whistle echoing through the stillness
• The varying colors of the soil
• Where have all the cotton fields gone?
• Serenity and peace abounds among the those laid to rest in hallowed ground
• The changing sounds of a car moving on asphalt and concrete
• Magical shapes of trees
• Travelling on roads that began as wagon traces
• To pedal the Trace - 60 miles a day = 6 ½ days to complete the ride
• Magical rainbows are all over the wall. Sun casting mini rainbows on each tile as the light streamed through a fluted window at a Trace comfort stop atop a hill.
• Families from Quebec dry camping on a secluded hilltop near the grave of Meriwether Lewis
• Gray-haired boys of summer atop their big Harleys
• Picnic areas along the Trace filled with bikes – motorized and pedal
• Split rail fences - Natchez Trace
• Company farms – not family farms
• Miles and miles –still no place like home
• Blue skies, blue water = peace to the soul
• Horses and cows in peaceful, hilly meadows
• Old family cemeteries at the end of gravel roads
• Burls and other natural occurring tree parasites of mistletoe and moss
• Back roads
• Wonder how the entitled North Shore would handle living here
• Not another car in sight
• Cows resting in the shade of a single tree
• Roads dappled in shade from the tree canopy overhead
• Ups and downs and curved ribbons of roads following the contour of the land
• Natchez – a little less than anticipated
• What's up? Oh, yes, it's Sunday and everything is closed
• Wide river vista – a great view out the hotel window – we could/should have stayed here for days
• Limestone quarries
• Tunnels into bluffs
• A few beauties still - Rosalie, Endicott Hill, Stanton Hall, Monmouth and Dunlieft
• Getting old – iron bladder no more - Ahh!! Blessed relief
• Entitled to better
• The antebellum south brings to mind hoopskirts and gracefully gliding down the grand staircase
• Amazed anew at the vast and changing Midwest landscape – dotted with small towns, farms and manufacturing
• Stone houses in river towns
• Swamps and trees draped in moss
• Treeless Mississippi delta
• Desolate
• Cotton fields in all stages of picking - still not the fields I remember
• Desolate and monotone landscape with crops harvested
• Fascinated by water ways
• The family farms of southern Illinois are golden shades of brown - only splashes of color are an occasional tree or barn
• Wrack and ruin
• Abject poverty
• Abandoned churches, schools, village centers
• Houses with too much stuff discarded every which way outside
• Black cows with white stripes like Hampshire pigs
• River traffic at a stand-still in upper Mississippi
• Beautiful, muddy Mississippi flowing south
