The Travels of Eric and Lorna

So Lorna and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary last week with a trip to Asheville, North Carolina, and Townsend, Tennessee. This was a road trip for us, and we took L's car, since it is newer than my outback, and has a lot less miles on it. It did great. Poverty Point is a large Archaic period mound site in northeastern Louisiana.   https://www.nps.gov/popo/index.htm     The largest mound.  After Poverty Point, it was on to Natchez to start the Natchez Trace. In Natchez, Mississippi, we had lunch at King's Tavern , as one does before setting off on the Natchez Trace. I guess to really be authentic we should have gotten a  room for the night, but we still had to make Jackson before we stopped. In all seriousness, King's Tavern is awesome and you should make sure to go here if in Natchez. After lunch, we started the Natchez Trace. Read up on this road a little if you don't know an...

This is where we watched the eclipse, a field in the campground. There were two other groups in the opening and a large group at the beach. You can't really tell, but the light gets weird when the sun is, like 95 percent covered. There is plenty of light to see with, but it's just off. It's like there isn't enough of it to fill up the space. The strangest thing is we were in full sun in August, and you couldn't feel the sun on your skin at all. None. It was weird. I don't have the equipment to photograph the eclipse, but I did get some cool pictures of the shadow thing, which I had not heard of before until we saw it on the program at the planetarium.

This is site C1 at Energy Lake Campground in Land Between the Lakes . It's a pretty nice site, although the water is 100 feet or so away. The parking space, which is long, was a few feet away from the tent pad, which is pretty nice except for having to lug your stuff. This is a tombstone with a book (presumably the bible?) on a tombstone at Devil's Creek Cemetery in LBL . Great Western Furnace. Partially ended by a slave revolt, which is pretty cool. Have to look that story up. They have bison there. There is another herd that is in a large drive-through area, but there weren't visible when we drove through. (They can turn invisible. Little known fact.) So we were there for the big eclipse of 2017, and the only place where there were any crowds at all was the visitor center, seen in the next two pictures. And even it wasn't as bad as it looked. The wait to buy things was about 20 minutes or so, so it could have been worse. The camps...