Fall Break; Wawmanona and Dismals Canyon

Wow, I just loaded all the pictures for this post and I think this is the most picture heavy post I've ever done. Maybe I should've made it two posts, but too late now!

Saturday morning dawned bright and early. Erik woke up before the sun, so we got him out of his play pen and put him between the two of us laying on the ground in our sleeping bags. He sat there and talked to us for a really long time, until the sun came up and we were ready to get out of the tent. Then another day of adventuring began. 

Erik helping cook breakfast. 

His favorite thing to do these days is throw stuff away. As soon as he discovered the trash can, he started hauling everything that he could carry over to it to throw it away. Silly boy. 

Helping Daddy do the dishes. 

After breakfast we walked the short distance down to the lake. There were tons of ducks, and lots of trees that were changing color for the fall. 

Ethan and Erik arguing over whether or not to go swimming.

Okay, so this technically happens all the time, not just on this trip, but this was the first time Erik let us get a picture. He's discovered his belly button (or beep beep as we call it) and is obsessed with it. 

After our little walk we started breaking down camp. We make such a good team. 

Before leaving the state park, we took advantage of the play area for a few minutes before starting our 20 minute drive back to Florence. Erik may not look super enthusiastic, but he LOVES to swing. That morning he just relaxed and laid there while Ethan swung back and forth. It was cute. 

We loaded up and headed back towards Florence. We had one more stop to make before we headed south. Wawmanona, the highest domiciliary mound in the Tennessee river valley.

Built between 100 BC and 400 AD, this is not a burial mound, but instead was the cultural center for the surrounding people. They conducted trade and religious ceremonies here. 

Whew, that's a lot of stairs!

We stopped part way up the stairs and discovered what we are 90% sure is some kind of bug. Or just a piece of lint that happens to have legs and the ability to walk. You decide. 

Okay, why these people wanted to have to climb this darn thing just to trade stuff is beyond me. 

The top of Wawmanona. Pretty, but still not sure why they'd choose to put the huge amount of work into building this thing by hand so that they'd have to climb it every time they wanted to do anything. 

After touring the tiny museum (filled mostly with pottery shards) that is associated with this mound, we piled back in the car for the next leg of our trip. About an hour's drive south of Florence is Dismal's Canyon. We've heard about this from several people, and have been wanting to go check it out for a long time. This place has a pretty interesting history. It was a hideout for outlaws and highwaymen who preyed on the travelers moving along the "Devil's Backbone", now known as the Natchez-Trace Parkway. The canyon was used as a "corral" for people while the local native american population was rounded up before being forced to walk the Trail of Tears. The head of the canyon was dammed up and powered a grist mill, and you can still see the mill stones scattered around. Now it is a National Natural Landmark for two reasons. It is a beautiful canyon with breathtaking scenery,and is also the home of the Dismalites; the tiny glow worms that inhabit this canyon and only one or two other places in the whole world. It's a bit spendy to get in, but we are so glad we forked over the change, because it was SO worth it!

Ethan and Erik standing in entrance to the walk way that leads to the visitor's center. 

On the deck outside the VC, getting ready to head down the rickety stairs to the canyon below. 

The waterfall over the dam at the head of the canyon. The dam is a remnant from the canyon's gristmill days. 

The awesome swinging bridge that leads to seemingly nowhere. My biggest regret of the trip is that I didn't get a picture of any of us on the bridge. I figured we do it on our way out, but I forgot. 

The trail wound around through boulders the size of buildings, and often you couldn't see farther than the next couple of steps. 

The sandstone boulders are all covered in moss. They looked so awesome!

Embedded in the sandstone were little pearly white pebbles that poked out through the moss. Unlike this photo, most places you couldn't see the main rock underneath, you just saw these shiny little pearls sticking out of the green velvet. It was really pretty!

There were trees like this all over the place. Notice that these are full size trees, growing on a little outcropping of rock. It's not like these tree's roots could just go around the rock and into the soil beneath, there's several feet of empty air between the rock and the ground. It's pretty crazy. 

I love this picture of the boys. Even Erik seemed impressed by the awesomeness of the canyon walls looming overhead. 

Waiting for Erik to catch up. Whenever the ground was level enough we let him walk. 

He hauled souvenirs all over the canyon. He'd pick up an acorn and carry it until he saw a cool rock, then he'd carry the rock until he saw something better. 

There was all kinds of crazy stuff growing everywhere. It was beautiful. 

Taking a break under a fallen tree. 

Ethan checking out the fish in the stream, Erik enjoying the almost-too-perfect-to-be-natural rocks. They looked like they'd been polished to perfection and came in every color of the rainbow. He kept scooping up handfuls of them just to look at them all. 

Watching the stream pass under the fallen-tree-turned-bridge.

Isn't this tree crazy?!

I put a self portrait of Ethan in an earlier post, so I figured I'd better put in one of me too...

Everything still goes in the mouth. Don't know what this was, maybe another acorn?

1...2....3...JUMP!

He'd get so excited every time we put him down to walk. This time he was waving his arms in sheer joy and love of life. Super cute!

The detour to see Secret Falls. Not sure what's so secret about it, turns out you can see it from the main path. 

See, I told you that you can see Secret Falls from the main path. It was pretty, but nothing spectacular. 

Letting Erik explore the mossy rocks. It occurred to me that brushing up against one of those rocks must be like petting a Muppet. 

An awesome tree root trying to find purchase on a boulder. 

"Wait, you mean I have to walk through that tiny crack up ahead?"

Heading up the stairs onto the swinging bridge. We're now back at the head of the canyon. 

Okay, I take it back, I did get one of us on the swinging bridge. Just not from a cool angle. If you look a little ways to the right of the bridge you can see one of the old mill stones. 

Looking back the way we came across the swinging bridge. 

A last look up at the falls before we climb back up and out of there. Such a neat place!

After leaving Dismal's Canyon, we headed for home via Tupelo and Sam's Club. We were pretty worn out by the time we finished our shopping and made it home, but it was such a great trip. Come visit us, we'll take you to Dismal's to see it for yourself. And maybe we'll stay for the night tour and see the glow worms too, that'd be so Awesome!

Fall Break; Florence, UNA, Una, & Erik's first Camping Trip

Our final destination Friday afternoon was Florence, Alabama. We'd heard good things about this area and figured we might was well check it out. It's right on the banks of the HUGE and beautiful Tennessee river, in the same neighborhood as the childhood home of Helen Keller, and according to what we'd heard has a great historic downtown area that is neat to see. We crossed the river and the road spits you pretty much straight into the downtown area.

Which, by the way, is NOT all that interesting. I think Starkville has about as much to offer by way of fun downtown buildings and shopping. We had planned to find a parking place and then wander around town, but when it didn't really catch our interest we just kept going. The road we were on dead ended into the visitor parking lot for the campus of the University of Northern Alabama, which looked kinda interesting so we decided to walk around and check it out. From the paw prints on the road way to the statues lining the side walk, it didn't take us too long to deduce the UNA mascot.

 The first thing that caught our eye was this gorgeous fountain. Erik was pretty sad that we wouldn't let him climb in and go swimming.

 As we were enjoying the fountain I was looking around and noticed an unusual looking enclosure and just HAD to go check it out.

Meet Una and Leo III. The real live mascots for UNA. SO COOL!

Leo III, I love the wrinkles in his face!

Leo was VERY uncomfortable with all the attention. As more people started to gather (not fair, we were there first!) he got more and more worked up. He was pacing and growling and throwing a pretty major fit. The lion keeper (in the striped shirt) had to come out and talk him into quieting down. She was reaching in and petting he and Una, and is way more brave than I think I'll ever be. 

 After we'd had enough of the university, we headed into town to see if we could find anything cool. There were a few little things here and there that caught our attention, so it wasn't a complete flop.

This park had another great fountain that Erik splashed in for a while. 

Florence is the home of W.C. Handy, "Father of the Blues"

Any "Big Bang" fans out there? If so, you'll understand why we had to get a picture in front of the comic book store!

This is how Erik spent most of his time in the stroller. He refused to sit up straight, even after his fingers got run over. 

We finally decided it was time to figure out where to stay for the night. We remembered reading about a city park that had cheap camping, so we started driving around trying to find it. When we were totally lost, we finally admitted that we needed to find some internet and look up directions. We saw signs for tourist info and figured that they'd have maps and maybe even internet, so we followed the signs and wound up at the welcome center. Which happens to be located at the base of the Renaissance Tower, a huge tower that goes up  200+ feet above the tourist center and has a fancy rotating restaurant inside. Being the dorks that we are, we jumped in the elevator in our grungy travel-wrinkled clothes and headed up to check it out. (There was a menu at the bottom of the elevator and there was NO WAY we could pay to eat there, we just wanted to look out the windows.) The doors opened right into the restaurant, and the host greeted us and kindly (though not without a glance at his watch to see if he could afford the risk of having the dinner rush see us) allowed us to step inside to look around. It was breathtaking! The sun was just setting directly over the river on one side, and there was a lock and dam on the other side. You could see the city sprawled out beneath you, and it was just amazing. It was also a little trippy to watch the dining area spinning around us as we stood in the middle.

 We finally went back down and found a map to the park with the camping. We drove over there just to find out that the only tent sites were right on the river bank with nothing separating you from the water's edge. There was no way we were going to spend the next while chasing Erik away from the water on one side and the road on the other, so we headed east of town for our back-up campsite at Joe Wheeler Lake State Park. As you may have realized, if the sun was going down while we were in the tower, that means that by the time we were ready to set up camp, it was pitch black. "That's okay", we thought. "We've got flashlights!" After a few increasingly frantic minutes of searching we were forced to conclude that the flashlight had not actually made it from our house to our car. We were out of luck in a big way. We used the headlights on our car to set up camp and then used a couple of emergency candles I'd randomly thrown in to get our tinfoil dinners and banana boats on the fire and to play cards after Erik went to bed. It wasn't quite what we'd envisioned for Erik's first camping trip, but so far it wasn't going too bad.

Fall Break; Our Trip Along the Trace

Well, it seems like a long time since I've posted anything here. Our days are pretty much the same day after day, and we haven't been any where or done anything noteworthy for a while. Luckily for us, last week was Fall Break. I had a day off of babysitting, and Ethan had a day off of class (okay, so he actually just skipped his class that day, shhhhhh don't tell anyone!) so we decided to do something fun while the weather is still beautiful.
We spent days looking around online, scanning our atlas, perusing lists of day trip ideas for our area, and finally decided on a destination. The plan was to leave Friday morning and adventure around all day, camp that night and then adventure our way back home all day Saturday, and that's exactly what we did.
We got up bright and early Friday morning, loaded all our gear in the car and headed out.

We didn't know where we'd be at lunch time, so we made up some Green Chili Burritos and had them warming up in the window for whenever we got hungry. SO YUMMY!

We drove up to Tupelo, MS, passing lots of cotton fields all white and ready to harvest. I have to admit, seeing the cotton in the fields and in the big bales along the roadside makes me a little homesick for Thatcher.

Want a better look at any of the pictures on my blog? Just click the picture for a larger view. ( Don't worry, I know this particular picture isn't anything special, but just in case you want to see some other one I thought I'd let you know.)

In Tupelo, we got on the Natchez-Trace Parkway and headed northwest-ish. We'd heard good things about the Parkway and thought we'd check it out, although I have to admit we had our doubts. I mean, just how cool can a road get?  We were both forced to admit that it's pretty darn cool. You never see any buildings, and rarely see signs of other humans. Other than the occasional power line or overpass, it's just you and the road. The grass is neatly trimmed, without a speck of garbage. It's really just a beautiful roadway. There are pull-outs marking interesting sights along the way, and we stopped at several of these, though we only got out at one.

Pharr Mounds, the largest and most important archaeological site in Mississippi. 

The view upstream as we crossed the Tenn-Tom. Those are the locks that enable boats to get around the Bay Springs Lake Dam. 

The Cypress trees are changing colors for the fall, aren't they pretty?

We decided to get out at the pull out for the Tenn-Tom Waterway. Erik was sure excited to get to run around outside for a little while!

Headed from the parking lot to the waterway. 

So excited!

Erik spent most of the day doing one of two things. For more details, see exhibits A and B

Exhibit A. Snuggling with Elmo and taking a nap. 

Exhibit B. We call this fuzzy picking. You know, like berry picking, except he's picking the little fuzzies off his blanket. 

Another reason we call it fuzzy picking. Just like berry picking, sometimes you get one that's just too big and inviting to save for later and you have to enjoy it now. 

The first leg our our trip ended as we exited the Trace and headed east along the top part of Mississippi and into Alabama. Stay tuned for where we went next!