Friday, February 17th, 2006 - Drive the Natchez Trace Parkway to Merriwether Lewis Campground.

We took showers one last time in the nice warm bathrooms with unlimited hot water and then hooked up the trailer and continued working out way north along the parkway, stopping whenever possible to stretch our legs on the short trails. Right about the time we pulled over to take a look at Bear Mound, an example of the small temple mounds of the early phase of mound building, we also crossed the border into northwestern Alabama. The northern part of Alabama is quite hilly and I had to pay a little more attention to the rate of climb on the dashboard GPS to avoid big downshifts by the truck's cruise control.

We stopped to walk a nature trail at Rock Spring and were pleasantly surprised to find a beaver dam and lodge on the trail. We hoped, of course, to take a picture of one of the members of the beaver family, but in that we were disappointed. The newly gnawed trees all around the pond showed quite clearly that the beavers were still living there, however, which is a good thing because if they leave the park service will have to change some of the nature trail descriptions!

I think we're kind of suckers for nature trails, at least in the morning when we're still fresh and raring to go. As we neared the northern border of Alabama, we came across the Sweetwater Branch nature trail and also stopped to walk that one. The Sweetwater Creek really did look like nice, clear water with no obvious signs of pollution. It was clear that we were gradually driving back into winter because none of the trees had any leaves. About the only thing that was really green was some very healthy looking moss on some rocks beside the creek, but I expect that during the summer the nature trail is a green tunnel of vegetation, although possibly with the associated mosquitoes!

Just before we crossed the Tennessee River we stopped at the site of the old ferry (now replaced by a modern bridge). During the War of 1812 when Andrew Jackson was marching an army south to fight the Battle of New Orleans, the ferry operator decided to charge Jackson good and proper for transferring the army and supplies across the Tennessee River. He charged Jackson over $4,000, which may not sound like much now but was a veritable fortune in those days. So it's clear that price gouging was a common practice even in the "Good Old Days", which I guess I should file under the heading, "The More Things Change, The More Things Stay The Same".

Continuing north into Tennessee, we pulled into the Merriwether Lewis campground about 1 p.m. and set up the trailer on a site directly across from the bathrooms. Once again we found ourselves the only folks in the campground until along about sundown when one other camper put up a small tent. We definitely prefer it when we are not the only one in a campground, I expect because we feel a bit safer having someone else to call on in an emergency, not that it has ever happened, of course.

Faced with the choice of cooking in the trailer or driving about 5 miles west to the small town of Hohenwald, we opted for the latter. Besides, we were curious if Hohenwald showed any signs of having German settlers, because certainly the name Hohenwald, which translates into "High Forest", came from some German sometime. While we ate lunch in a Mexican cafe, we watched the weather channel and saw that a huge snow and ice storm was developing over the eastern half of the country. Unfortunately, our area of Tennessee was included in the areas that were forecast to have snow. Rather than risk driving the rig on icy streets, we mentally braced ourselves to stay in the Merriwether Lewis campground until it would clear up. Thus it was with some sense of foreboding that we returned to the campsite that afternoon. Nevertheless we gathered some wood and built our third campfire of the trip; this one was quite a bit smokier as we used mostly the sticks and twigs lying around, most of which were damp and hard to burn. When the sun set we retreated inside the trailer to work on the computers a bit, have dinner, and read the next few chapters of "The Twisted Root".