I guess I should start out by outlining our BIG TRIP. We're taking this trip to celebrate our new found freedom caused by my retirement. We've never camped for more than a week at a time and never more than a days drive from home. On this trip we'll be gone 6-8 weeks and travel over 2500 miles. We plan on leaving Oct. 7 and taking two days to get to Norris Dam State Park in Tenn. That will put us just up the road from The Museum Of Appalachia for their Fall Heritage Homecoming Festival. We plan to spend a couple of days there and then on Sunday, move to the Seven Points COE facility outside of Nashville. We'll stay there for five nights seeing Nashville and then move out to start down the Natchez Trace Parkway. Its 444 miles long and we'll be taking lots of side trips. One big side trip will be to Memphis to sample the BBQ ribs. Others will include Shiloh Battlefield. We'll continue to Natchez and then to Baton Rouge and then to New Orleans. From NO we'll come back up through Alabama to Birmingham and Huntsville and cross back over into Tennessee and stay around Chatanooga for a few days. Then back home.
I'm excited at the prospect. Also scared at the challenge of all that unknown. I don't want to plan any more than I have to but my biggest fear is not having a place to park at night. So, I'll do some reserving on the road but try not to get locked into any hard schedule. After all, the idea is to relax and see some of this great land of ours. I have to fight against my engineering bent that compels me to plan it all out. I do want to have a pretty good idea of what there is to see as we go along. I don't want to get back and discover that I was only a few miles from some place I really would have liked to have seen.
View Beginning in a larger map
