As we left Big Bend National Park on October 6, we began the long road home to Virginia in earnest. We decided to book east with some serious driving, and made more than 900 miles over two days, crossing through Texas and Louisiana to the banks of the Mississippi River. Much of our traverse was on interstates, and we stayed overnight in the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel east of Fort Worth.
We spent two nights at a campground in Vidalia, Louisiana, across the river from Natchez, Mississippi, one of the oldest settlements on the river.
We did not extend our stay in Vidalia because Hurricane Delta was barreling in from the Gulf of Mexico.
Natchez served as our jumping off point for traveling up the Natchez Trace Parkway. It's managed by the National Park Service (similar to the Blue Ridge Parkway) and provides a leisurely route north through Mississippi with peaceful views of forests and fields, no traffic lights or stop signs, and hardly any other travelers. The Parkway continues some 440 miles north to Nashville, but we only traveled it for about 260 miles to reach northern Mississippi. Our oldest son Tory biked the entire Parkway as part of a school trip around 2006.
We spent a couple of nights near Jackson, MS, letting the hurricane pass west of us, then continued on to Tupelo, MS where we spent three days camping at Tombigbee State Park. We had a quiet celebration of Doug's birthday, did some hiking in the park, and also visited a Tupelo city park that houses the boyhood home of Elvis Presley.
We realized that over the past two years we've done the complete Elvis pilgrimage (although not in chronological order), from Tupelo, to Sun Records in Memphis where he recorded his first singles, to Las Vegas, to Graceland (where we spent Thanksgiving last year, and where Elvis is buried next to his parents).
Leaving Tupelo, we headed into "Sweet Home Alabama" (at least that's what the sign says when you cross the state border on the interstate) to visit Hunstville and the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). Doug has always been something of a space nut, and Marshall is where NASA's biggest rockets were designed and built. We spent a face-masked day at the U.S. Space and Rocket Museum which sits on the MSFC campus.
As soon as you pull into the parking lot, you're greeted by a full size model of a Saturn 5 rocket, 363 feet tall.
Inside one of the museum spaces, they have an actual Saturn 5 rocket hanging from the roof. Interestingly, we had seen another legacy Saturn 5 earlier this year when we visited the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. MSFC had the famous ring (seen in a Tang breakfast drink commercial) that connected 2 stages of the Saturn 5 rocket on display ,along with pictures of it loaded on a tractor-trailer being shipped on a two-week voyage from its factory in California. To say it was an over-sized load was a bit of an understatement. The entire route must have been a no-passing zone. Traffic in Huntsville must have been a mess on shipping days!
They had other interesting Apollo-era artifacts, including a lunar rover (which was designed at MSFC). They showed a video of the rover being un-folded from the side of the lunar landing module - it was folded origami style to be flat against the side of the lunar lander. They also had casts of the Apollo 11 astronauts' hands that were used for making custom gloves.
There were a number of exhibits about Werner von Braun, who worked at MSFC for much of his American career. There were also tons of pictures of very serious looking men in lab coats, wearing the same black-rimmed glasses and, one assumes, plastic pocket protectors. No lab coats, black glasses, or pocket protectors were on display, although slide rules and drafting tool kits were.
MSFC has an outside "rocket garden" which included a full-size mockup of the Space Shuttle. Doug was in heaven! Jeannette cannot get him interested in the garden at home - perhaps the addition of model rockets would do the trick!
There was another exhibit where they had a full-size mockup of the International Space Station (ISS). The ISS mockup is used as part of the Space Camp activities held at MSFC, but we were able to walk through part of it. Doug waxed poetic thinking back to his own experience at Space Camp in Florida about 20 years ago with our oldest son Tory. If we had grandkids, he'd be back there in a heartbeat!
We moved on to Chattanooga, Tennessee, a city we had not visited before. That journey took us back into the Eastern Time Zone, a zone we had not been in since March. For some reason, all the campgrounds in Chattanooga were booked. However, we found a spot through a website called Boondockers Welcome, where RV enthusiasts make overnight accommodations available for free to other RVers. So we camped overnight in their driveway! With access to electricity and water, what more could you want?
We spent a day visiting various spots around Chattanooga, including the Tennessee River where we hiked across the Walnut Street Bridge (now devoted solely to foot traffic).
Looking back across the river, we could see Lookout Mountain in the distance.
We drove to the top of Lookout Mountain for panoramic views of the city.
We also toured Point Park on top of the mountain, where the National Park Service maintains a key fortification from the Civil War. There is a "peace memorial" sponsored by the State of New York on the grounds. It is topped by a statue of a Confederate and a Union soldier shaking hands.
The mountains around Chattanooga are made from limestone, and riddled with caves and caverns. We took a lantern tour through Raccoon Mountain Cavern.
Leaving Chattanooga, we moved to the tourist town of Pigeon Forge, Tennessee for a multi-day exploration of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. More about that in our next blog post! We'll be staying in a KOA just down the street from Dollywood. Ya'll check back soon, yah hear?
Comments