Wheres Wanda and John Now

  Well...even though we are right outside of Chaco Canyon we are not getting in AGAIN! This is the 4th time we've tried to make it to the canyon and just a few days before we arrived, there was a huge rain storm that washed out the north road. So it goes. Instead we visited another Aztec site just north of our campsite.  The Aztec Ruins National Monument is an area of preserved structures built by the Pueblo people between 850 and 1130 and then discovered again in 1878 by anthropologists. The photo below shows the entire site (not our photo) We were able to walk around the site and into some of the buildings.  (the rest of the photos and videos are ours) The large circular building in the center is called the Great Kiva.  A Kiva is a gathering place for spiritual ceremonies, religious rituals and political meetings.  The smaller rooms around the outside were used for food storage, cooking, eating and sleeping. We wandered around inside some of the rooms and it w...

  We are on the famous RT 66 highway and we stopped at an RV park in Adrian. It's right across the street from the MidPoint Cafe which is an iconic 1950's style roadside diner sitting at the exact geographic halfway point (1,139 miles) on RT 66 between Chicago and Los Angeles.  Sadly we were only able to have coffee and pie instead of a full diner breakfast.  The town only has 150 people in it and the diner can't keep enough people employed to have the grill open. The pie was amazing anyway. 😀 We leave tomorrow morning and will be entering New Mexico.  We are only one stop away from my bucket list trip to Chaco Canyon! Stay tuned.

 This is the last Army Corp of Engineers (COE) site that we will be in until our return trip.  They are mostly in the eastern and midwest part of the US unfortunately.  And again, this place is beautiful and almost empty. Last night we had a 'Red Moon Rising', and no, it's not the sun set.  This shot is straight out of my phone, no filter and no adjustments. Before we left Arkansas we visited Fort Smith which is a confederate fort on the Arkansas river.   The site included the original fort, the court house, the jail and the gallows where between 1875 and 1896 there were a total of 86 executions. Also on site is the Fort Smith Museum of History. Very interesting exhibits and I played the Judge. I felt like Judge Judy for a minute 😀 Tomorrow we leave Oklahoma and will be stopping in Adrian Texas.

  I was sad to leave our spot in Mississippi yesterday.  It was just about the perfect campsite. We're in Arkansas today on the beautiful Arkansas River.  Another really nice place.   The temperature has gone down to the low 80's with a nice breeze so it was great for a scooter ride. Just two nights here and we're off again tomorrow morning. 

We left Alabama yesterday and drove another 5 hours northwest into Mississippi just south of Tupelo.  Here's a dashcam video of our drive into the campsite. It's one of the largest COE's we've seen. And for $15 a night and full hook up you really can not beat it. We're getting very spoiled.  So beautiful and not at all crowded.  This is our view today of Grenada Lake. John and I took a scooter ride this morning and we ran into this group of good ole boys from Mississippi.  They’re here for a blue grass festival and I was lucky enough to get a little taste of their music.  They gave me a personal concert and it was so amazing.  This is what I love about camping.  You just never know what you’re going to run into.

This barge came right behind our campsite. It was surreal watching this big long boat cruise so close to us down this small, lazy river. I copied this from Google : These diesel-powered tugs push heavy cargo barges up and down the river and through the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, moving bulk commodities like coal, grain, and petroleum products. During the 1800s, shallow-draft wooden steamboats dominated the river, transporting cotton down to Mobile and returning with manufactured goods. Before steamboats became common, early settlers and traders used flat-bottomed keelboats and flatboats that drifted downstream with the current. In other news: I did get up and go hiking this morning. John decided to stay back so I went by myself.   Unfortunately, this trail hasn’t been used in a long while and after I walked through about the third huge spiderweb stretched directly across the trail, (they were very hard to see) I decided it wasn’t a good place for a nice hike. I didn’t want to ke...