Thank you, Elvis & Helen Keller!

Aloha all,

if the Natchez Trace were a race, we are doing terribly and getting worse by the day: In the two weeks since the last post, we haven’t even advanced 100 miles on the Trace and then we were barely moving at all…it’s almost like we want to come in last. We blame our delay (and the length of this post) mostly on Elvis, Helen Keller and the Civil War. Here are our excuses for being so darn slow to get to Tennessee and for writing so many words between the colorful pictures:

Elvis with his first guitar & Elvis as a superstar,
posing with his two newest fans

Tupelo is our new favorite town in Mississippi. It is the proud birthplace of Elvis Presley. Still, under normal circumstances, it would take less than a day to see the Elvis sites. The very modest cottage where he was born takes only minutes to see, but the site offers so much more, including a museum about Elvis’s childhood and a beautiful park with various statues of him. And my favorite part: The old neighborhood church they moved from its original location to the birthplace of Elvis. Yes, my favorite part was the church, a small and very barren one even.

At first, it looks like any old, rural church. We’ve seen dozens of them before and they usually look very barren and seem kind of dead. But there was a nice lady talking about how the Presley’s loved going to that church, how this was the center of their community and how much Elvis enjoyed the gospel music here. Makes you want to be a fly on the wall and experience what it was like, doesn’t it? Well, with a push of a button, that’s exactly what we got: Thanks to the ingenious use of modern multimedia technology, the barren and somewhat lifeless chapel transported us back to the 1940’s and put us right in the middle of a lively church service with lots of music, lots of shouting, lots of praising the lord and even a young Elvis singing for the congregation as he did about 75 years ago. I can see why Elvis liked going to church more than I ever did.

Tupelo’s favorite story of young Elvis is how his mom took him to town to buy a birthday present for his 11th birthday. Supposedly, Elvis really wanted a rifle, but his mom was too worried and convinced him to get a guitar instead. And just like that, she unknowingly changed music history. The Tupelo Hardware store is still around. It’s still a hardware store and it still sells guitars, probably making it the only ACE Hardware store that sells a guitar every day. 

And just in case all of that was not enough to turn us into Elvis fans already, Tupelo scheduled their annual Elvis Festival just in time for our visit. We already felt pretty lucky getting our tickets for the final night of the big competition. But it got even better: When we went to pay for our RV site right by the arena, we run into the Executive Director of the place, who was either too lazy or too nice to charge us anything, making us feel even more welcome. And then our campsite neighbors gave us free tickets for a second festival event…the world really conspired to turn us into Elvis fans and we were happy to comply.

Eight Elvises have entered the building

So our first post-vaccine concert would be the finals of this year’s Tupelo Elvis Festival competition, with the top five Elvises competing to be the chosen “Elvis Tribute Artist” to represent Tupelo at the Ultimate Elvis tribute competition in Memphis in August. 

The evening included performances of this year’s competitors and previous winners. I never thought that I would enjoy over 4 hours of Elvis performances so much. How much, you ask? Enough that we happily went back for more the next day when the Elvis Tribute Artists sang at a gospel concert. Most people agree that Elvis is the King of Rock’n Roll, he’s definitely also the King of Tupelo and very much alive. We were so grateful about our lucky timing. You’ll have to imagine the pronunciation: “Thank you, Tupelo, thank you very much!”

Happy Campers at Tishomingo State Park

The next three days, we spent on beautiful lakefront campsites at Piney Grove and Tishomingo State Park, hiking, disc golfing, swimming, BBQing and enjoying nature. After six weeks of mostly flat, often swampy landscapes, the rock outcroppings of Tishomingo were pretty impressive. No wonder it was voted ‘Best Hiking in Mississippi’, …not just by us!

We're not in Louisiana anymore...

We love talking to other travelers or locals wherever we go. We got recommendations to some of our favorite places that way. But “the exception proves the rule”: We talked to a very nice boy and his father in a park in Iuka, MS. They recommended going to Woodall Mountain, but warned us about the town of Corinth. You know we are easy to please and can find pleasure in any small detail, but there was nothing redeeming about Woodall Mountain, no view, nothing to see and nothing to do. The best thing about it was that the road looped around so we could easily get off that mountain again. At least we can now say that at 806 feet, we have been to the highest point in Mississippi. However, Corinth, which they had warned us about, seemed like the safest, most well kept, proudest, little town we had seen in the South so far. 

Sunset in Corinth, MS

We spent three days at the Civil War Interpretive Center in Corinth and the National Military Park at the battlefield in Shiloh. Both are run by our beloved National Park Service and both were fully reopened. That means we had the always friendly and knowledgeable park rangers to ask questions, we saw two excellent NPS movies and we were able to catch a total of seven(!) ranger walks and talks. So now we know a tiny little more about American history. For example, I had always wondered why one of the deadliest battles of the Civil War had been fought way out west in Shiloh, Tennessee. It wasn’t even a real town (and still isn’t). Now I know: The actual target of the Union army was the town of Corinth, because it was at the only crossroads of the major North/South and East/West railroads in the South, supplying about 80% of the provisions for the Confederate army. Both sides knew: Control of the railroads, combined with control of the rivers, was the key to victory.

The Crossings in Corinth, this is what thousands died for

We are always grateful that we are about 160 years late when we visit civil war battlefields. The very lively and enthusiastic explanations of ranger Tim on our guided hike is about as close to war as I ever want to get. Another ranger program was about the battle flags of the Confederacy, but I still don’t understand why, even in 2021, some people still display the Stars and Stripes of the United States together with battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, even though they are not even from Virginia and that army was basically formed to fight against the United States. Of course, it always gets more complicated the more you learn about something. In hindsight, it’s easy to applaud Lincoln for holding the Union together, especially since they had the moral high ground in the central question of slavery. But shouldn’t the Union let states be independent if they did not want to be part of the United States anymore? Isn’t that exactly what the Declaration of Independence was all about?

One of seven ranger programs at Shiloh

To lighten things up a little bit, we squeezed in another day of combined stick & disc golfing at the Pickwick State Park. We made it back on the Natchez Trace for just a few miles, before we had to take another detour to “The Shoals”. This is the nickname for four small towns along the Tennessee River in Northern Alabama: Florence, Sheffield, Tuscumbia and Muscle Shoals. They are four individual towns, but all grown together.

And this is where we really got stuck. We rarely spend two nights in the same place, for us to spend a whole week in one place is almost unheard of, but here’s how they tricked us: Just like in Tupelo, they scheduled a festival for us, but they scheduled it for the following weekend after our arrival. Then they gave as the very last and the very nicest camping site in their popular riverside campground…so we had to stay the whole week to enjoy the campsite, see the sights and go to the Helen Keller Festival. Luckily, “The Shoals” offers a surprising diversity of attractions:

• Ivy Green is the Birthplace of Helen Keller. She’s the American author, advocate, and lecturer who lost her eyesight AND her hearing when she was just 19 months old. I have a hard time even imagining living in a world I can’t see and can’t hear. To visit the home where she was born and grew up was very inspiring. There are three lucky circumstances why Helen Keller became a national hero, rather than a forgotten retard: 1. Her parents had the resources to hire a teacher. 2. That teacher happened to be “miraculously” good at her job and 3. Helen Keller just happened to be an extraordinary smart woman. Her accomplishments were so impressive that she got to meet every single American President from Grover Cleveland to JFK. 
  
  

  

  The very well where Helen Keller
  learned her first word

  
  
• “The Miracle Worker” is the play based on Helen Keller’s childhood and has been performed on site, right behind her birthplace for the past 60 years. After 16 months without live theater, we would have been happy to see anything, but seeing this powerful play in such an iconic location was a real treat.
  
  

  

  The Miracle Worker at Ivy Green,
  our first live theater play in over a year

  
  
• We have seen several Frank Lloyd Wright buildings before. They are always timeless, beautiful, original and leaking. The Rosenbaum House in Florence is no exception, but it is more humble than the others we have seen. “The Frank Lloyd Wright home for the rest of us” as our very knowledgeable docent called it. We would be happy to move in there, unless that makes us responsible for the leaking roof, which seems to be a signature feature of all Frank Llyod Wright building. But I am always amazed that his buildings still look modern, even though this house was built in 1940…and which other “starter home” still attracts a steady flow of visitors 80 years later?
  
  

  

  Frank Lloyd Wright's Rosenbaum House

  
  
• It sounds weird now, but until last week, we did not know anything about the “Muscle Shoals Sound”. Now, after visiting the “FAME” Studio”, the “Muscle Shoals Sound Studio”, the “Cypress Moon Studio” and watching the “Muscle Shoals” documentary, it seems like everybody should know about this phenomenon, unless of course you are from some far away country or have been hiding on some tropical island for the past 25 years. In case you are not familiar with musical influence of Muscle Shoals, this is what all the fuss is about: For mysterious reasons, about 50 years ago, this remote area in Northern Alabama became THE place to record music. It might have been the hard work of dedicated people like Rick Hall or Jerry Wexler or the creative collaboration of white and black musicians during an otherwise still very segregated time or some magical power of the “Singing Tennessee River” or just pure coincidence. I guess if you really want to know why everyone wanted to record in this small town with a weird, misspelled name, you’d have to ask Aretha Franklin, Simon & Garfunkel, Lynyrd Skynrd, Rod Steward, Dire Straits, Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens, Cher and The Rolling Stones, just to name a few. True music nerds could name a thousand more. We got to meet a variety of interesting people on the three studio tours, from current studio owners and engineers to a retired Tower Record Executive and even the wife of Rick Halls. They were all very different, but all told equally fascinating stories, in the very places where the magic happened.
  
  
  

  

  "The room where it happened"
  at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio

  
  
• Next to Downtown Florence is the Historic Pope Tavern and the University of Northern Alabama, probably the prettiest campus I have ever seen anywhere. And next to that is the Historic Walnut Street neighborhood. So many beautiful, old homes; most of them with front porches that looked just a little bit too perfect, as if the swings or chairs are set up more for decoration than to be enjoyed. I mentioned that when we finally saw someone enjoying his front porch with his dog…we started talking and soon we joined him on his front porch and became instant friends with him and his wife. In fact, we went out for pizza with them 2 days later. Some people are just very easy to talk to.
  
  

  

  On the front porch of our newest friends 

  
  
• We also had a few fun meals in special locations: A revolving restaurant high above Wilson Dam, a fun birthday dinner with alligator tail and crab legs at the marina next to the campground and a lunch in a cave with musical entertainment.
  
  

  

  The Rattlesnake Saloon in a cave outside of Tuscumbia

  
  
• To pass the time until the festival, we played some more disc golf, I swam in the Tennessee River and we visited the Indian Mound Museum and the Belle Mont Mansion just outside of town. We spent one night at the Alabama Music Hall of Fame. They are a Harvest Host, but you might be surprised to hear that I found the museum rather uninspiring. It seemed somewhat random and not well curated. I could have just read some Wikipedia articles about a bunch of musicians and gotten more out of it, but Wikipedia does not let us stay overnight with Joy.
• We enjoyed two evenings of music at the Helen Keller Festival, one with a parade in downtown Tuscumbia and one in the beautiful Spring Park. We loved listening to the diverse variety of music and it seemed the performers felt the same way,. For several it was the first time performing in public after the covid hiatus. And since music is such an important part of Alabama, all the musicians were really top notch. 
  
  

  

  Lindsay Ell at the Helen Keller Festival

After a week in “The Shoals”, we are ready to hit the road (or better: the Trace) again. I’ve got a feeling that if this small area in remote Alabama has this much to offer, there might be other treasures hidden around the country that we are still blissfully unaware of. If we were to find anything else of interest, I might write another line or two about it.

Until then, Aloha from The Shoals,

Chris & Sandra

Loosing Track of Time on The Trace

 Aloha all,

when the ladies at the visitor center in Natchez told us that we could spend a whole week on the Natchez Trace, I had a feeling we might be able to beat that. We love it when we can take all the time we want to get somewhere…or even go somewhere different all together. It’s been two weeks since we started on the Natchez Trace and we are only about half way through.  

We might be the slowest to drive the Natchez Trace, but we are not the first: Ulysses Grant, Bunt, Jefferson Davis and Ann have all been on it. Elvis Presley and Oprah Winfrey were both practically born on it. Meriwether Lewis died on it. 

Mapping our track along the Natchez Trace

Driving the Natchez Trace is a unique experience. It’s a whole different kind of road and it has a very unique feel to it. Here’s a quick recap, in case you are not familiar with the history of “The Trace”: Originally, this route between Natchez, Mississippi and Nashville, Tennessee was part of a network of trails used by Native Americans mostly for trading. There are still several “Indian Mounds” along the route, including the “Emerald Mound” just outside Natchez, which is the second largest in America. Starting in the late 1700’s, pioneers walked the same routes to settle in what was then the western frontier. in 1801, President Thomas Jefferson designated it as a national post road, clearing it wide enough for wagons to be used. 

The Trace saw its peak usage for the next three decades, when so called “Kaintucks” took all kinds of goods from the more developed Ohio River region down the Mississippi on wooden floats. There was no way to go upstream on the Mississippi before steamboats were introduced, so when the Kaintucks got to Natchez or New Orleans, they sold their goods, disassembled their floats and sold that lumber, too. To get back up north, they walked up the Natchez Trace or rode on a horse if they could afford one. During that time there were over 50 'stands' along the trace, offering provisions, food and very sparse accommodations to the travelers. We visited Mount Locust, one of only two surviving stands. Once steamboats allowed the much easier return upriver, the trace became obsolete and almost forgotten. 

In the early 1900’s, first efforts were made to establish a new Natchez Trace Parkway, commemorating the historic route. In 1938 it became on official unit of the National Park Service System. The new road follows the old trace as much as possible, but more importantly, it avoids any modern developments whenever feasible. It wasn’t finished until 2005, but now it is a 444 mile Parkway from Natchez to Nashville. It is designed to minimize any distractions, other than the historic markers and sites along the way, of which there are many. But you won’t see any traffic lights and there are hardly any intersections. In fact, you see hardly any houses, power lines or any other reminders that it’s not 1820 anymore, except the well paved road. Commercial use it not allowed and there are faster roads for people who actually need to go somewhere, so there is very little traffic on the trace and nobody seems to be in a rush. It’s very relaxed driving through a continuous greenway. We enjoyed the uninterrupted, lush green forest, but we met one fellow traveler who was wondering “when the trees mights stop, so that he could see something…”

Joy at one of the Natchez Trace campgrounds

It would be nice just to drive the Natchez Trace Parkway from start to finish, but we did several detours to include some nearby attractions:

• Grand Gulf before the Civil War was a bustling town of over 1,000 people. Hard to imagine that a town of that size can just disappear, but after a yellow fever pandemic, a tornado, an exploding steamboat, erosion from the Mississippi taking 50 blocks of the town downriver and a civil war battle, there is almost nothing left of the town. But they turned it into an interesting state park with a very nice campground, a museum, an observation tower and even a submarine that was used to smuggle liquor during the prohibition. But we will admit, our favorite part was the fresh catfish that our campground neighbors caught and gave to us, so delicious!
  
  

  

  Freshest catfish we ever ate

  
  
• The Windsor Ruins were the perfect ending to our tour of plantation homes. This might have been the fanciest home of them all when it was built. It survived the Civil War, only to burn down by a carelessly discarded cigarette in 1890. The wooden structure burned down, the ornate iron staircases “disappeared”, but the brick columns are still standing today, so the whole scene reminded me very much of the many ruins I have seen in Greece.
  
  

  

  The Windsor Ruins

  
  
• The Vicksburg National Military Park is the site of the famous Civil War battle and the siege. It was a crucial early victory for the Union, splitting the Confederacy in half and giving the Union control of the all important Mississippi River. The successful siege of Vicksburg also catapulted Grant’s career. We spent a whole day on an audio driving tour of the battlefield, visited the memorials and the recovered wreck of the USS Cairo, the only surviving ironclad warship of that time, which was lost in the Mississippi mud for almost a century.
  
  

  

  The ironclad USS Cairo,
  recovered after a century in the Mississippi 

  
  
• But the town of Vicksburg offers a lot more: Similar to Natchez it sits on a natural bluff above the Mississippi…well, actually it sat above the Mississippi: The river has since moved. The Army Corps of Engineers has a very interesting museum in Vicksburg, explaining the history of the Mississippi and the complex flood control levee system. We also visited the place where Coca Cola was first bottled. In 1894 an industrious soda fountain owner bottled the new drink to sell it to his rural customers. At first the Coca Cola did not want to be in the bottling business, they thought soda fountains were the best way to sell their product. I think they changed their mind eventually. Today, they fill about 1.8 billion bottles a day. But our favorite place in Vicksburg was the 10 South rooftop bar, the liveliest place in town, with the best views, enough reasons for us to go there both nights.
  
  

  

  If we had been in Vicksburg for 3 nights,
  we'd probably had gone to this rooftop bar
  a third time

  
  
• The Mississippi River Basin Model once was the largest hydraulic model in the world. It covers 200 acres and was built to better understand the water flow in the Mississippi Basin, especially after the devastating 1927 floods. It’s been abandoned for decades and so overgrown that we did not even see the Rocky Mountains, even though supposedly they are 50 feet tall. It would have been quite the playground for my hydrological brother, even without water. It’s been a very hydraulic week anyway: Lots of rain, a leaking water pump in Joy and several nights of lake front camping.
  
  

  

  Just a tiny part of the huge
  Mississippi River Basin Model

  
  
• Jackson, the capital of Mississippi is a weird place. We liked everything we did here, but we don’t like the city. The State Capitol is very impressive. The Mississippi History Museum, the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum and the Mississippi Art Museum were all fascinating, we had a great lunch at the Iron Horse Grill and stayed at the wonderful Le Fleur Bluff State Park just outside of town, but other than that, the town seemed desolate and uninviting. We are not alone with that sentiment: I’ve never been in any state, where people are genuinely proud of their state, but mention so frequently how much they dislike their capital. 
  
  

  

  This capitol is the best part
  of this capital

  
  
• I also figured out how to break 80 in golf: We played a fun 9 hole stick golf course and on the same day also played 9 holes of disc golf. That did more for my score than any lesson or new clubs will ever do.
  
  

  

  The disc & stick golf day 

  
  
• The Ulysses Grant Presidential Library was a very pleasant surprise. Since we never had a president from Mississippi, I would not have expected a Presidential Library here, but since 2008, the Mississippi State University ist home of Grant’s Library and it is very well curated. They say it only makes sense that his library is here: By loosing several battles during the civil war, Mississippi did more to advance Grant’s career than any other state. The museum gave us a new appreciation for Grant and for the South, for honoring the guy who defeated them. We were impressed by the whole MSU campus in Starkville. According to the Census Bureau, the town of Starkville has a population of only 25,387. I assume that does not include the roughly 25,000 students at MSU…
  
  

  

  On the Mississippi State Campus 

We realize how ridiculously lucky we are that we get to take these long road trips and see all these different places. So occasionally, we like to pay it forward. Earlier this week, we helped a stranded veteran with a breakfast and with jumping his car. Then we helped a guy in Jackson who claimed that he was carjacked. To be honest, we have our doubts whether that’s true, so we didn’t give him money. But whatever his situation is, he should not go hungry, so we took him out for lunch, which actually turned out to be very pleasant and very delicious even for us and “one of the best meals ever” for our new ‘friend’.  

Joy's good deed on Memorial Day

Now we are in Tupelo, the birthplace of Elvis and it just happens to be the annual Elvis Festival. So our first big, post-vaccination event will be an Elvis impersonating competition with thousands of socially distanced Elvis fans. But I’ll send this out before we see the show and before we even visited Elvis’s birthplace, maybe one or two of you are curious enough to come back to read all about that in the next blog.

Aloha from Tupelo, Mississippi,

Chris & Sandra