Kentucky - Day 14 - scenic route back to Ohio County

Ohio County Park, Hartford
Monday, 14 October 2019

today's route (the northern one)

I had to do some serious arguing with Google to get a route I wanted, and maybe in retaliation it gave me directions that got me lost a couple of times.  Thank goodness for AAA maps.  I've found they're much more detailed and accurate than most official state maps and than even much of Google's mapping, heresy though I know that is for some folks.  Worth my dues just for the maps.  So I got found again and drove some places I hadn't yet seen.

My first stop was the Kentucky Dam and hydro station I drove across the other day.

TVA's Kentucky Dam
(last night's campground is behind the trees in the background)

hydro station

bridge just downstream from the dam -
people fishing from the bank give you the scale here

propeller - see sign below right

the sign beside the propeller

the reach of the TVA's work

I've left these photos at a fairly large size partly so you can see them better and partly because they were all on such an enormous scale in real life I hated to diminish them.

This whole project is the work of the Tennessee Valley Authority, established by Congress during the Depression, which has been working all these years to control flooding, provide electricity to a part of the country that didn't have it then, and provide economic advancement.  It seems to have done all these things fairly well, and they're still going strong - more than you can say for most of the Depression-era projects.

This is by no means the only dam in the area.  Just a short way down the road, for instance, I passed a sign for access to Barkley Dam and Powerhouse.

In one of the small towns I drove through, Gilbertsville or Eddyville maybe (Kentucky is real big on town names ending in -ville or -boro), I saw a sign for Los Agave's Mexican Restaurant.  Misplaced apostrophes are something I notice.

All day I passed cropland in various stages: cut down, being cut down, ready to be cut down.  Mostly corn and soy beans, I think.

example of fluorite

The town of Marion boasts the Clement Mineral Museum as a prime place to stop.  I didn't take the time but looked it up later, and it does seem worth a stop another time.  They say they have thousands of specimens of fluorite crystal, which are known to change colors and show off fluorescent colors in UV light.

I got this photo off the internet, and other examples show some beautiful colors.  Odd kind of stone.

I passed through the very small town (pop. 2000) of Sturgis (why do so many states have towns called Sturgis?) where they host the Kentucky Bike Ride (as in motorcycles) every July.  Not to be confused with the famous rally in Sturgis SD each August, though it sounds like Kentucky's working on being a rival.

Morganfield has several industrial plants all in a row.  I saw Vibracoustic (their noise/vibration/harshness solutions are likely in your vehicles); Raylock (their product, Engineer's Sandbox, provides hundreds of apps for all engineering fields, they say); and Sonoco (originally Southern Novelty Company, now an international provider of packaging materials).  That seems like a lot of industry for a town of 3,200 folks.

Part of U.S. Hwy. 60, which I spent much of the drive on, has been designated a Kentucky Scenic Byway.  What I saw along there were crop fields, scattered trees and houses and small towns.  Didn't seem especially scenic to me, but it may be much prettier during the summer growing season.

an example of the scenery

I saw a church with the sign, "Autumn Leaves - Jesus Doesn't."

I heard on the radio that some airline is now providing nonstop flights from Orlando FL to Owensboro KY.  Owensboro is where Brady lives, the guy who'll be fixing my heater.  A nice enough place but I can't begin to imagine why someone in Orlando would be wanting to fly there.  Evansville IN, just across the Ohio River, would make much more sense to me.  Odd.

I went back to the campground where I'd stayed a few days ago, knowing it'd be inexpensive and comfortable and fairly handy to hop up to Brady's when he's ready to fix my heater.  I was just pulling into the same campsite I'd used before when I saw a Downy Woodpecker fly onto a tree trunk right by where I was.  A good omen, maybe.  They're so cute.

they're only about 8" long - cute little guys (this isn't my photo, of course)