The neat things you find off the beaten path

Something that I like to do, although we don't do it nearly as often as I'd like, is to travel NOT on the interstate highways.  On our route from the Meriwether Lewis Monument to our next campsite in central Mississippi, there really was no way to make it by interstates or 4 lane roads without going hours out of our way.  So, we let the GPS guide us on the "fastest" route through the back roads of Tennessee and Mississippi.  Most of it Andrea found boring and there wasn't much for mobile internet signal so she was relegated to reading books for most of this leg of the trip.  One of the gems that we accidentally happened upon on the trip was the Shiloh National Military Park.  We had no idea it was even on the route and only decided to pull in because we saw a sign on the road that the entrance was in some thousand feet.  We didn't really plan on doing much other than hitting the visitor center and getting some cancellations and moving on.  In the end, we spent about 2 hours there and barely scratched the surface for what one can see at this National area.  Contained with in the Battlefield area is also a National Cemetery and ruins of Indian mounds.

This drummer boy wasn't much older than Parker

The entrance to the National Cemetery

We tried to teach the boys some respect here.  It sorta worked.  It's amazing to think that most if not all of the trees were not present when the cemetery was made.  There's a number of places where headstones have been displaced due to tree growth.  Despite being in Tennessee, the largest numbers of troops buried here are from Illinois and Ohio.  Shiloh has many memorials to troops from many states.  This was a big battlefield.

Whenever we do nature hikes, the boys demand that we stop and read every sign .  Now that Parker is reading pretty well, he wants to try to read them.  Unfortunately, most of the vocab. is too much for him and he gets frustrated.

That big river in the background is the main reason for why so many Ohio and Illinois troops were at this battlefield.  The river can be traced back up to the the Ohio River near the southern tips of Indiana and Illinois.  At the point of this photo, we were on top of an ancient Indian Mound.  The Indians had (apparently) chosen the spot as well for its strategic location on the river.

So eventually we had to get to a campsite for the night.  Finally, we would pull in to a place with hookups and be able to have a supremely warm night of sleep as well as dump the tanks.  We had chosen the Roosevelt State Park in central Mississippi.  Although we took the rural way to it, it is located right off of I-20.  The park is actually two campgrounds and a public-use park around a lake.  We got there on a Sunday night and stayed only one night which worked well for us.  We got there after-hours and a camper explained that there was a big foliage festival during the coming week and weekend and that the campgrounds would likely be packed soon.  But, on this Sunday evening there was a plethora of site choices, most of which were lakeside.  I had to chuckle when the helpful camper (in a 30+ foot motor home) told me that I ought to go to the campground on the other side of the lake because it was, "newer, bigger sites, not so many trees around, and sewer on each site.  That's where I'd be if I weren't here with this group." As he gestured to the other motor homes parked near him as well as one rolling in. That made my mind up for me...I was going for the "older" park buried in the conifers before me.  As you can see below, we had a beautiful site.  I gathered some fallen wood and made the only campfire that we had on the entire trip.  It was really great to sit by the lake around a fire and make some popcorn.  I've learned in the past that the true beauty and magic of sitting around a campfire is very lost in pictures, so I didn't take any.