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Wanderung 11

A Tantalizing Taste of the Texas Tropical Trail

January-February 2006

Tuesday, February 14th, 2006 - Driving the Natchez Trail to Jeff Busby Campground.

By morning the temperature in the trailer had dropped to about 40 degrees, which was quite nippy although much more bearable than it would have been in a tent because the air inside the trailer was, of course, calm. Just for grins I tried turning the furnace on and lo and behold it worked right off the bat! My best guess was that the battery had recovered a bit of charge after being disconnected for most of the night. It still took a while to heat the trailer back up to 60 where we had our thermostat set, but since we could stand in front of the warm air vents to get dressed it wasn't too bad at all. Rather chilled after the night without heat, however, we changed our breakfast menu from cold cereal to hot cereal. Using the stove to boil water helped warm the trailer and the hot cereal helped warm us!

After breakfast we hitched up the trailer and were on our way north to the Jeff Busby campground, the next official parkway campsite. During the drive we poked along and stopped whenever any of the roadside attractions struck us as interesting. The Mississippi Crafts Center on the north side of Jackson, Mississippi, had a wide variety of arts and crafts from local and regional artisans. We spent a good half an hour looking at all of the pretty and creative things before reluctantly coming to the conclusion that we didn't really have the room back at home to display the woven baskets that I liked or the pottery that Monika liked. As we left, the friendly lady at the desk told us about a tiny cafe in the town of French Camp just off the parkway further north, where she suggested we might stop for lunch.

We found yet another Indian mound just north of the craft center, but this one was quite a bit older than Emerald Mound, being constructed around 600 AD Apparently the mound served mainly as a graveyard for the small band of Neolithic Indians who lived there over several centuries. I was amazed how much of the life style they could reconstruct from the graves and, no doubt, from other trace measures like seeds, pollen grains, and so forth. The early mound builders grew maize in small fields near the village and supplemented that with hunting and gathering from the resources in the area.

On the northern edge of the Ross Barnett Reservoir was a very nice example of a cypress and tupelo swamp. The national park folks had built a boardwalk so that we could cross the swamp and had installed informational plaques about the ecology of the area about every 30 feet on the trail. I was surprised to see cypress swamps that far north as I had imagined them to primarily be in Florida, but obviously I was wrong. That made me wonder how far north you can find cypress swamps, alligators, and the associated ecology. The majestic trees were perfectly reflected in the dark, tannin stained water of the swamp, forming some striking designs. Even the green pond scum on the surface of the swamp swirled around in the currents to make curious and interesting patterns.

A very different nature trail farther on led us through a pine forest. Besides the common and economically important Southern Pine, the trail had nice examples of the Loblolly Pine that we had been seeing along the side of the parkway and the Short Needle Pine. I had not known that Southern Pine could be harvested for pulpwood after as little as 5 years of growth and was big enough to produce commercial lumber after 20 years. At least when I burned the remaining 2x4s later that afternoon in a campfire I had the satisfaction of knowing that it was a readily renewable resource!


 

Heeding the advice we had been given, we stopped at the tiny village of French Camp to find the cafe, which turned out to be located in an old log cabin that had door jambs so low that I knocked my head on them. We sat at a rough trestle type of table in ambiance so thick you could have cut it with a knife. At that time of year only local folks were eating there--it was the only place in town to have a meal--and a friendly woman immediately inquired about our trip and started chatting with us and the other folks. We truly felt included in the conversation, and that is something that happens only rarely in strange places. The food was, as we had been told, plain but excellent and with portions large enough that we split an order. The advantage of splitting an entree was that we felt justified in also ordering and splitting a desert called a "mudslide" which seemed to be kind of a brownie dough with added pecans and other nuts inside and a caramel coating. We chose to have ours ala mode so it was all topped off by ice cream and it made a delicious end to the meal.

Just north of French Camp we arrived at Jeff Busby campground and set up the trailer for the night. Since we could level it out without disconnecting it from the truck, I took the easy way out and left it connected for greater fore and aft stability. We had stopped early enough that we had plenty of time for making another campfire from the wood I had brought along. The campfire was a cheerful thing to play with for the afternoon and burning the last of my 2x4s freed up space in the bed of the pickup, so it was a "two-for-one". As the sun set we went inside the trailer to work on the computers a while and then have dinner, followed by a bit of reading and bed.

Copyright 2006 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Prolog Map Epilog

January 06
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
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8 9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28
29 30 31
February 2006
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8 9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28

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