Vacation October 2014

Oct 14

We drove an hour to get to the Natchez Trace Parkway. There was a hotel very close to the trace, but it was 30,000 points rather than 20,000 points for the hotel where we stayed. But the hotel where we stayed was farther from the trace than I realized. Lesson learned (maybe).


We made several stops on the trace -
. Someone's ferry house. The old trace.

Jackson Falls

Gordon House Historic Site

Old Trace

There are many places along the length of the trace where you can stop and see the old original trace. There are other places where there is no parking spot, rather just a sign with an arrow point to "Old Trace." This particular site was a good example. It is a long section of old trail. It was however a challenging place to get a good photo, with the very mixed lighting and colors.

A couple of the first stops gave me a chance to experiment with my new Nikon Camera. I had been taking plenty of photos but I took the opportunity to do some tests. I am pleased with the results with both the zoom capability and the manual settings capability. See these additional photos here.

We missed our turn off to head for Savannah and when we realized it, we turned around headed back North. We had to back track about six miles. We had only gone about two miles when I saw this big blur go by the right side of the car. I notices rain drops in the blur but what was it? Birds? And then Connie said, "A tree fell!" I looked in the rear view mirror and saw a tree laying down with the tip of it just touching the roadway. Had it been a few feet longer or had grown closer to the road it would have fallen directly on our car at the precise moment we drove by. I made we wonder the rest of the time we were on the trace when a tree might fall on us. We drove by many trees that had fallen onto the road and had been cleared.

Once that excitement was over, we were back at the exit and headed for Savannah, TN, and down to the Shiloh battlefield. We stopped in Savannah, TN for a milk shake. It was about 2PM local time, and we had gone a good while without anything to eat. The milk shake and an apple was our lunch and it tasted might good. Burger King does them right.

I have a second page just on the battlefield tour because of the volume of material and the significance to me.

We stayed over night in Tupelo, MS (Holiday Inn Express). We were looking for Vanelli's restaurant. It was rated as one of the best restaurants in Tupelo. Both the GPS and my phone showed us where it should be but it wasn't there. We were right in front of our hotel so we went in and checked in. We asked the desk clerk were Vanelli's was and the lady got a strange look on her face and said, "You may have heard that we had a tornado back in April? Well it was right out there. The tornado took it. That empty lot right out there." It had been directly in front of the hotel, and as the clerk said, there was nothing but an empty lot now. So we had dinner at Outback Steak House next door. They ruined Connie's steak and then fixed her good one and didn't charge us for her or my dinner.