Natchez Trace, Day 1

Thursday morning found us back on I-40, driving due east.  I don’t think I have ever seen so many trucks on the road!  I started counting, and I think the ratio was pretty close to ten trucks for every one car.

I may have mentioned it before, but a Mini Cooper is a very small car.  It is a lot of fun on some of the roads we have traveled on this trip, but not much fun when jockeying around tractor-trailers.

We crossed the Mississippi River in Memphis, and for the first time in many weeks were back in the Eastern United States.  In honor of John Lee Hooker, I found some of his music on YouTube and we entertained ourselves listening to the great blues man singing “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer” and many other Memphis Blues classics.

 

Finally, we arrived at our destination and our accommodation for the next two nights, Natchez Trace State Park.  The park has been around for a long time and is not very far away from Highlands, but we have never visited it before. 

 

Before we checked in at the Park, we drove into nearby Lexington, Tennessee, where we hoped we might be able to find some supplies.  We were staying in a cabin with a full kitchen and needed to stock it up just a little, so we stopped in The Food Giant, apparently the only grocery store in Lexington.  Immediately, we realized that we were back in the South again, where shopping carts are called “buggies” and groceries are placed not in bags but in “sacks.”  I realized that we stood out as tourists, just as much as visitors to Highlands do, in our traveling clothes and emerging from a convertible sports car.  I was walking down one aisle when an older woman stocking shelves asked me, “Do you have change for a penny?”  Ha!  I love places like this.  At the checkout counter, a man asked me, “Where are you from?”  and as quickly as I could I replied, “Where do you think I’m from?”  We enjoyed some good-natured banter and learned that in Lexington, Tennessee, North Carolina was an acceptable place to come from.  Yes, we were back in the South.

 

We drove into the Park and found our little cabin, right on the shores of a pretty little lake, Cub Creek Lake.  We had come 6,875 miles so far.