Thursday, 31 October 2019
I
spent today in the campground. No wifi signal so I’ve been
finishing up the blog posts on my computer’s word processing
program. When I’m writing these posts, I spend the majority of my
time just writing. I spend most of the rest of the time looking
things up, and most of my frustration on trying to make the photos
appear as I want them to look. I can’t do the looking-up part
without wifi, and I can’t do much about placing the photos because
this program isn’t at all like the blog program, but I can at least
get the writing done, and that’s what I’ve been doing.
It’s
been raining off and on all day. Rain was forecast, but I thought it
was supposed to end early. If so, that isn’t happening. In fact, as the day went on, we started getting some really strong winds that blew the rain in hard sheets. But I’ve
got my umbrella and rubber boots (“John had great big
waterproof boots on. John had a great big waterproof hat. John
had a great big waterproof mackintosh. And that, said John, is
that.” A.A. Milne). And towels to dry off the dogs. And a heater
that’s working (yea!) to help us all dry off. The dogs would rather
walk, even in the rain, than stay indoors. And because we have
choices, it’s cozy here.
This
campground has, as a primary attraction, a public beach on Carr
Creek, which looks exactly like a river to me and nothing at all like a creek,
but oh well. They don’t want dogs on the beach so I don’t take
them down there, but the parking lot there gives us a little more
walking area. Needed because this is a tiny campground – only 39
sites. But my site is paved and completely level (for a change) and
very comfortable. Just no wifi signal. Can’t have everything.
What
it does have, according to the park ranger, is lots of deer and wild
turkeys. I knew there was something here because of the way the dogs
both alerted this morning when we were out on our early walk. Of
course, "early" in these days of waning Daylight Savings Time and a
sunrise around 8:00 AM (absolutely absurd – this is southern Kentucky, not
Alaska) is a relative term, but it was about 6:15 AM or so. I’m
thinking it was maybe a turkey, just because they were both excited without
being frantic, as they often are with deer. It was still more than I
could handle before coffee.
When
I was choosing a route to take tomorrow into Tennessee, I’d planned
to go through the Cumberland Gap. Hard to beat the history of that
route. A young woman I talked to early in the month told me she’d
driven through it, only to turn around and drive right back through
again, just for the sake of doing it. Which made perfect sense to
me.
Except
I learned accidentally, from a brochure I picked up at a Visitor
Center a few days ago, that the route I’d be taking isn’t through
the original Cumberland Gap. Instead in the 1990s Kentucky, Tennessee and
Virginia joined with the federal government to pay for and build the
Cumberland Gap Tunnels (one southbound, one northbound) and remove
the highway that had been built through the Gap and restore that area
to approximately its late 1700s appearance. More than 20 years since
the Tunnels opened, people are now able to hike the Wilderness Road
through the Cumberland Gap. Of course, it’ll take a lot longer
than 20 years for the forest to grow back to the density they’ve
planned, but it has a lot more chance now that the road’s been
removed than it did.
The
Tunnels sound as if they’re a sort of series of tunnels, with cross
passages for emergency access. They have state-of-the-art
ventilation, lighting and communication systems (their website claims) and
closed-circuit cameras to keep an eye on things. I’m guessing the
reason they’ve got all this is that the Tunnels are 4,600’ long –
quite a distance for an enclosed space like that.
As
you know, I don’t do so well with tunnels, I think because they
feel so confined with no elbow room for drivers. The same problem I
have with bridges. I like to feel like I’ve got a little margin
for error – especially in the large vehicle I’m driving. So I
don’t really want to drive for the best part of a mile in a tunnel
– special lighting and air or not. But I might do it anyway if it
were really the original route for the Cumberland Gap. Since it’s
not, I can’t see forcing myself to do something quite
uncomfortable.
Instead,
I decided to go quite a few extra miles, but I’ll do most of
it on wide, divided parkways and interstates. Probably boring, but safer.
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