Vicksburg

Wednesday
Sally has still not fully recovered from her recent relapse, so we thought it best to have a very gentle day and take the trailer over to Vicksburgh (we had planned to drive as a day trip). It is only 50 miles, so once we were packed up it was a fairly easy drive.
We eventually found a site in the RV park attached to the casino. Not a very attractive site. Very busy, people coming and going all the time (I mean all the time, even through the night), too noisy. Anyway, it is clean and feels safe.
Thursday
Today we have explored Vicksburg. Vicksburg is a funny sort of a town, totally dominated by the line of fortifications built around it. These are now a National Park and left for pertetuity. They are large earthworks which form an arc to the east and stretch from the shore of the Yazoo in the north, to the shore of the Mississippi in the south. The town is built on a bluff overlooking the river. The shoreline has a number of small casinos spread along it. As we drove through, there seemed to be many old houses, some in good repair, others dilapidated. But it was not easy to find a heart to the town. The shops and administration seemed to be elsewhere. Washington Ave, from Clay to Grove St seemed to have the most life. They are an area that has been renovated and includes the oldest Coca Cola bottling plant in the world museum (don't ask how, when C C was developd in Georgia, as we did not go into it). We did find a delightful little drop-in coffee bar, called Highway 61, tucked away down one end of this area. They were very friendly and sold a coffee called 'Dancing Goat Coffee', which promised much, but was actually just a nice cup of coffee. We had a bagel as well, as it was past lunch time. (we toured the battle site in the morning, I will come back to that).
A number of people just sat around - they played cards, or used their laptop, or read one of the hundreds of coffee table books available. I read a brilliant one on the design of the Airstream. Cost us less than $5.00, inc. refills. Thoroughly recommend it. The weather had taken a turn for the worse, so we stayed a bit longer. After that we toured round to look at the famous antebellum houses. They were very pretty, but somehow forlorn, perhaps we still had civil war monument depression from the morning, realising what the people in these houses had been through while under siege. We stopped off at a Thrift shop, because they always have a huge selection of second hand books. Found a couple, inc one on the National Parks, published 1959.