We have been slowly moving down the Natchez Trace Parkway. It is very pleasant, if you like trees. The Parkway is a limited access road with a speed limit of 50 m.p.h., so it is very easy motoring. There are frequent stops for ancient sites and views, Indian stuff, Civil War stuff, settler stuff, even French stuff. We stayed at Davis Lake for 3 nights to allow time for Sally to recuperate from a flare up of her CFS/ME. It was so beautiful and the weather was improving all the time. A family of eagles lived across the lake, unfortunately I did not get an good close ups.
Leaving Davis Lake, we travelled on Sunday to Jeff Busby Camp. This is a campground with minimum facilites, but no charge either. It was a pleasant evening in the woods. I even managed to get a small campfire going, even though everything was very wet. By now we had clear blue skies and pleasant temperatures in the high 60's.
Mississippi is a very pleasant state. They grow lots of soy, cotton and sweet potato. Unfortunately the really wet Fall has all but destroyed the sweet potato harvest. We also saw a lot of soy fields underwater. It is quite flat and there are lots of swamp areas.
On Monday we continued, making our earliest ever start as we left the Jeff Busby campground at just after 9.30!!!.
We stopped for lunch at a picnic ground river overlook imaginatively called River Bend. Fortunately, there was a local on hand to explain the meaning behind the old american name. It seems (he told us very seriously) it is called River Bend because it was on a bend in the river! Sure enough as we looked at the river it was indeed on a bend! Mind you we were stupid enough, or patronising enough, to say "Oh yes, the river does bend here". That does not detract from the fact that it was a very beautiful sight.
Talking to another local (Don't ask me, they just start talking to us), he said that there were many alligators in this river (it is actually the Pearl River) and how disappointing it was that we were not here in September for the Gator Season. So we, like idiots, asked what the Gator Season was. Believe it or not they actually fish for alligators using rod and line. It is controlled (so he says) by license. There is a ballot and if you win you can take two gators, one less than 8 feet and one more than 8ft. He mentioned the state record had just been broken be somene landing a 13ft gator. It seems they use stuff like they use for marlin fishing. But Marlin don't bite back.
The river opened out into a large, very large, huge lake, which was about 20 miles long. We ran along side it. Eventually we crossed the dam at the end, called the spillway, and arrived at our destination for the night, Timber Lake Campground. We would stay here while we explored Jackson, capital of Mississippi.
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