Back east of the Mighty Mississippi

As we continued our eastward trek, we seemed to run into a bit of snag...or at least a change in our modus operandi for our daily planning (as much as “making it up as we go” can be called planning). After the wide open spaces of the wild west, there are soooo many roads and route options in the east. And a three hour drive can get you completely through an entire state. We also seem to have run out of public land where we can camp for free, and campgrounds seem to be a bit more crowded.

we did not steal anyone’s rv parking at Mount Locust Inn.

From Loos’anna we decided to head over and check out a stretch of the Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi. We landed in a fun state park just outside the town of Natchez and were able to explore a bit. We got the tri/road bikes down for the first time in months and cycled up the parkway to Mount Locust Inn historic site - cool place and history and had a great conversation with the volunteer on duty. On the way back, we stopped at the Emerald Mound site; google it. It is another odd off-the-beaten-path piece of our country’s rich history that we knew nothing about!

tons of cool and curious places to visit along the Natchez Trace

Human and animal footprints (plus some loess soil) resulted in the Sunken Trace.

The Sunken Trace is another cool place to stop along the route - to think of all the people that passed that way before and wore a trackway into the earth is impressive. Even though we only drove about the first third of the Parkway, it’s a worthy scenic road to check out history and just get off the interstate system for a stretch.

We diverted from the parkway to continue our eastward meandering and were oddly drawn to the town of West Point, Mississippi. Of course it rained or was gray and overcast much of the time we were there. But we stayed at a great US Army Corps of Engineers campgrounds. We continue to be impressed with Corps sites. They are well managed and maintained, scenic, inexpensive, and usually not overly crowded. We camped on a lake on the Tenn-Tom waterway for about $20 with water and electric - oh heck yeah.

We didn’t spend long in Mississippi before heading over to Alabama. The googles helped us find a great place to mountain bike just outside Anniston so we headed there to play. The Coldwater Mountain trail system is a LOT of fun. We were able to start on some green (easy) trails and work our way up to the blues (intermediate). The trails were definitely designed for biking and allowed us to slowly rebuild some confidence in our skills after Dawn’s handlebar eating incident in Moab, Utah. There were several sections of trail that had us grinning from ear to ear.

Our last southern state before heading down to Florida was Georgia. We stopped in the Atlanta area to visit friends, but stayed well on the outskirts (big city traffic isn’t our thing) in another superb Corps campground. We had a great time visiting with Jen and Di. Our final stop in Georgia was in the Valdosta area where we enjoyed the services of another Air Force base Famcamp (also a great source of affordable campgrounds) route to the Everglades.