We left the Walmart near Little Rock early to avoid the predicted wind. But, it caught us shortly after Memphis and we pulled off at Natchez Trace State Park and ate lunch and took a 5 mile hike. The hike was great, but while we’re really enjoying our first spring since 2006, I discovered that I still have hay fever and I spent most of the hike blowing my nose and rubbing my eyes. The wind was supposed to stop around 4, so we continued towards Nashville avoiding interstate 40. It was still windy so we stopped in Dickson at a Walmart for the night, where fortunately the allergies weren’t as bad as they were at the state park.
Pollen on the hood of the truck, just in the time it took us to take a walk. No wonder I was sneezy!
In the morning, we continued on to Nashville without any major problems with the wind. We were just about to give up on finding a place to park when we went over the bridge and saw the Titans’ Nissan Stadium wide open parking lots. It wasn’t cheap, but it was easy parking and we were able to walk back over the bridge and walk around the capitol area. Nashville was more of a city than we expected, with an expansive skyline. The capitol area is more like a museum, with very informative memorials and exhibits. There were tributes to all the presidents who came from Tennessee - more than we expected - as well as exhibits of artifacts from the capitol itself when it was renovated. The capitol is imposingly set at the top of a hill overlooking the river and the business district, and we could easily see why so many people love that city.
Our next planned stop was Great Smoky Mountains National Park, but we knew that was more than a day’s drive for us, so we used our apps and found Ragland Bottom Army Corp of Engineers Campground. They require that you book online, but I couldn’t find any non-electric campsites for campers, so I called the campground to see if we could get a walk up site. The ranger I talked to explained that we did have to book online before we got there, but told me which of the non-electric sites could fit our rig, and advised me to just answer the questions to make the on-line booking system happy. So, that’s what I did and we found ourselves in a very nice site overlooking the dammed lake. We’ve been impressed with all of the Army Corp of Engineers campgrounds where we’ve stayed, but this one was even nicer than the others. They had free hot showers in the cleanest bathrooms I’ve ever seen, and they were very accommodating about letting us go to an empty site with services to fill our water tanks, although we didn’t need much water since we used the very nice hot showers. We ended up staying there two nights instead of one because the wind continued, but that just gave us a day to enjoy the park. When the wind died down after two nights, we headed towards the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
