Last week we took a short trip to eastern Arkansas and, after that, over to northeast Kentucky.
Our first campground was at Village Creek State Park. The park is located on Crowley’s Ridge, a geologic anomaly of rolling hills in eastern Arkansas’s Mississippi Alluvial Plain.
With five trails totaling 7 miles, we had hoped to spend one day in the park doing some hiking.
Unfortunately, there was some kind of gnats hatching out. After taking one walk the first evening where we couldn’t get away from them, we decided to alter our plans and check out some of the other parks in the area.
The first day, we went to Parkin State Archeological Park and Jacksonport State Park. The next day, we drove over to Memphis and spent a few hours at Mud Island. I’ll be posting more on these as I get the photo gallery set up for each one.
The last evening that we were there and the next morning before we left, we didn’t have much problem with insects at all.
Our next destination was Paducah, Kentucky, so that Karen could go to the annual Paducah Quilt Show. Karen has several posts on her blog from the quilt show:
Old Faithful Hamilton’s Store
Devils Den Paddling
Campfire at Elkmont
Blacktail Plateau Drive
Heavy flow
Green River Ferry
Abyss Pool
Smoky Mountains on a cloudy day
Still recovering
Cedar Falls at Petit Jean
Lake Fort Smith Campground
Near the end of the season
Cave Formations
Milky Blue
Autumn Grass
Graffiti in the Park
Leaves on Lake Bailey
Foot Bridge
Sorghum furnace
Mountain Laurel
Canary Springs
Another blog that I’m trying to post to on a regular basis is Haw Creek Out ‘n About. I’m currently only posting photographs from our travels there.
The images posted here are photos that were posted on Haw Creek Out ‘n About over the last month.
All of my photos that I publish here and on Haw Creek Out ‘n About are from my online photo galleries. They are randomly selected and only used one time. Photos published on Haw Creek Out ‘n About will not be published on Exit78, except for those use for announcements of new galleries, and vice verse. Some of the photos may have been been posted previously, before I had established the galleries.
While I would like to publish other material in addition to the photos, I have so many photos that I really want to focus on getting the photo galleries built.
I suppose that I could just post all of the photos on Flickr or some other service. However, the photos are intended to be integral part of my Haw Creek web site, — which will eventually include information to go with the photos, so I want the photo galleries on Haw Creek.
I hope to be adding more photo galleries to Haw Creek soon. When they are up, I’ll announce them on each of my blogs.
I’ve been working on publishing this photo gallery for several days, but have had a number of distractions — from having problems with software to a severe storm that cut off our power and, eventually, led to the loss of water pressure.
The Mammoth Cave National Park photo gallery is now up, though, with pictures from our two days visiting near the end of May.
Here’s a few images from the gallery:
Into the cave:
Cave formations
Whitetail deer
Green River Ferry
We live in a rural area and most of our travels are to rural parts of the United States, so seeing a deer — or three or five — is no big deal.
We’ve seen that many out of our kitchen window.
I understand that most people do not have that opportunity and that, when they’ve seen a deer, they want to let others know so that they can see it, too. I know that they are just trying to share. I really do know that.
However, it’s a little hard not to be just a tad bit condescending, “Yeah, well, we see them all the time. It’s just a deer!”
I try not to.
However a couple of weeks ago, at Mammoth Cave National Park, we ran into a young family who had just spotted a deer quite a ways up in the woods laying down with its head just sticking up above some rocks.
Now, it’s quite an accomplishment to spot a deer in the woods when it’s laying down, not moving and quite a ways of the trail — at above the trail, at that.
However, the father of the family went on and on about where it was and that it was really a great view. On top of that one of the kids really went over the top to do his part to “help” us see it.
I finally saw it and couldn’t resist saying, “That’s the fifth one we’ve seen today.”
I think I said it nicely…, I hope so.
I’m sure they were from a less rural area than us and that seeing a deer in the wild is a big thing, but still….
On August 28, 2007, we had a really impressive deer related experience. We were at Devil’s Tower National Monument on a day that was going to be really rainy, so we took a drive over into South Dakota to go out to eat and do some shopping. Along the road we kept seeing little herds of deer. In 50 miles, we counted 95 head and I’m sure we missed a lot. Now that was cool!
Below is the deer that was pointed out to us at Mammoth Cave. This is the best photo I took, at the highest magnification of my zoom lens and cropped with my digital image editor.
It’s just a deer — but I doubt if I would have spotted it without it being pointed out to us.
I got some better images earlier on the trail — including some shots of a doe and a very, very young faun.
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A week ago, we were camped at Fort Massac State Park, along the southern border of Illinois, on the Ohio River. Fort Massac is just a short distance away from Paducah Kentucky, on the other side of the river.
If you have anything to do with quilting — or any interest at all in quilts — The American Quilt Museum is a wonderful place to stop. This was my second visit…, and Karen’s third!
After spending an hour or so in the museum, we went out to eat and then stopped at Hancock’s of Paducah, a giant fabric store. We escaped without too many purchases.
Before heading back to the campground, we spent a little bit of time exploring the historic downtown area of Paducah. It’s a nice area that seems to be thriving, certainly more than a lot of old downtown areas these days. It has many of the same sort of stores that a lot of the historic downtown areas have, though, thankfully, there was not an excess of t-shirt and stupid-souvenir shops.
While we didn’t walk into many shops, we did find one that had an interesting interior courtyard, with some nice metal sculpture — for sale, of course.
The name of the shop is Bebe’s Artisan Market and it had a number of interesting pieces for sale.
Bebe’s is located on a very picturesque side street just a couple of blocks off of the river.
We’re sitting in a B arnes and Noble in Peoria, Illinois, catching up on e-mail and other stuff.
Today was supposed to be a rainy day so we decided to look for Barnes and Noble stores in the area that we are in so we could get online. Turned out there was about 10 within 60 miles, but none closer than 50 miles, so we decided to drive to Peoria, Illinois.
We had planned on leaving last Wednesday, but decided that we didn’t want to drive through the remnants of Gustav all day, so delayed a day. It started raining Tuesday and rained hard all day Wednesday. We had a lot of water running through the yard off of the road. Fortunately, though, we live near the top of a hill in the Ozarks, so flooding is never a real concern. We did get word today that the main highway from our area going north is going to be closed for a month for road repairs. We figure it was probably slides due to all of the wet weather that we’ve been getting this year.
The drive Thursday was wet most of the day, but there wasn’t any bad rain. By the time we got to our destination, Fort Massac State Park, we hadn’t seen any rain in a couple of hours and the ground was dry. Fort Massac is the site of several forts dating back as far as the French and Indian War, each fort built over the ruins of the older ones. It is located on the Ohio River in southern Illinois, across the river from Paducah, Kentucky.
On Friday, we visited the quilt museum in Paducah, a huge fabric store (Hancocks of Paducah), and the old downtown area. I’ll have pictures that I’ll be posting later from there and other places.
Saturday, we took a long drive and got some photos of a old native mounds site and another really neat state park, the name of which eludes me right now…, more photos. We drove through the old river town of Cairo, Illinois. I got a couple of shots from the Ohio River, but none from the Cairo. It seems to be a dying town.
Yesterday, we drove to Starved Rock State Park in north central Illinois. It seems to be very large. We’ll be exploring it some tomorrow when the weather will be better. From there, we’ll be going into Wisconsin on Wednesday.
Hopefully the remnants from this next hurricane will not come back around and go though our area back home. Everything is so saturated. Fortunately, we’ve got family, friends, and the neighbors watching and checking the place so we will know right away if there is anything wrong.
While we are traveling, I won’t be checking in as much on all of the feeds that I normally use and won’t be able to comment while we’re traveling. We will be at a campground starting Wednesday that will have wireless.
