Tennessee, 10/18/21: Hitting Our Stride | |
Now that we are on the road, things are looking up! | |
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Let me start off by saying that I embrace diversity. So when we drove into downtown Carbondale and saw a variety of restaurants specializing in Yemini, Thai, Mexican, Indian, Italian, and good-old Americana cuisine, I was delighted. It was 9 am and Mary Lou’s, a typical downtown breakfast cafe, was the only restaurant open. It was jam-packed, so we got two egg-and-cheese sandwichs to go. They were decadently awesome - a fried egg and gooey cheese on a thick slice of toast, fried and assembled right in front of us on a grill strategically located behind the main seating counter.
Carbondale itself was a clean and prosperous college town, but not too interesting architecturally. Our map showed a lot of green space and parks on the outskirts, but we skipped that. We were hunting for wild spaces not city spaces.
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Mary Lou’s Cafe in downtown Carbondale. With the grill right behind to main seating counter, the cook put on a show. | |
Carbondale has a diverse culinary selection from the countries of Yemen, India, Thailand, Italy, Mexico, and, of course, America. | |
I just love these old-time architectural flurishes. Carbondale needed many more of these ornate buildings. | |
When I was a kid, before Amtrak, I rode the Illinois Central passenger train from Chicago to New Orleans. | |
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Three hiking trails within a 30-mile radius caught my attention, and we hit each one. First up was the Trillium Trail tucked into the huge 4000 acre Giant City State Park. The plaque promised 2 miles of rugged trail climbing a tall sandstone ridge riddled with slots and caves.
Again, we saw that alien twisted rock art - well, that’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it, at least until I see an info plaque that tells me different. The trail was rugged, and we found slots to squeeze through and caves to explore.
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Next up was Natural Bridge of Pomona. OK, it didn’t meet the standards of Utah’s Natural Bridges National Monument or Arches National Park, but what would? Still, the rugged trail delivered us to a rugged stone bridge, carved out by a rugged creek. If anything, the Shawnee National Forest is rugged. | |
The under side of the bridge. | |
The top side of the bridge. | |
So very sad! This armadillo seemed to have just recently rolled over and died of old age. There wasn’t any decomposition nor any wounds. | |
The final rugged trail led us to the Panther Den, a beautiful sandstone rock formation hidden deep in the woods. Finally, we stumbled across a plaque that disabused me of my alien twisted rock art theory. It turns out that the swiss cheese holes in the sandstone were formed by melting glacial waters roaring through the area 100,000 years ago. The presence of sandstone means that a shallow sea was once here. So, we are back to the same ubiquitous “volcano, shallow sea, and glacial action” as the main geological events forming the topography. So far, two out of the three have been verified for this area. I am sure that a volcano spit something out around here sometime during the past 4.5 billion years. | |
The drive along a single lane dirt road to the Panther Den Trailhead. | |
The 1 1/2 mile trail to the Panther Den. | |
What tree has these kind of thorns? We tried to look it up but to no avail. | |
We were pleasantly surprised that the climbing did not beat us up. Maybe we are finally getting better conditioned, and finally hitting our stride. Jeez, you’d think so after six months of hiking up and down hundreds of miles of trails. We returned to camp feeling pretty smug. It was late so we just made sandwiches. | |
Some of the sights along the back roads as we drove from one trail to another. | |
The only genuine Root Beer Saloon we have ever seen. | |
Stopping for an ice cream cone. Surprisingly, there is a lot of masking down here. With our booster now 2 weeks old we are, theoretically, back to full strength, but we still take some precautions indoors. | |
L.L. Bell, not L.L. Bean. | |
Glossary of terms used for newcomers: 1) V-Jer. The name of our camper. 2) Saturn. The name of our Van. 3) Duende. Our mischievous gremlin that breaks things. 4) Tata. The good gremlin that helps us fix Duende’s dirty work. 5) The Black Hole. This is what we call Walmart because every time we go in for just a couple of items, we come out spending way more than we figured. 6) QT. Quaint Town. 7) Little Buddy. This is what we call our Dyson cordless stick vacuum. | | | | |
