Tennessee.....

Hello,
We're in Tennessee!! Dyersburg, Tennessee to be exact. Today was another scorcher, with temperatures approaching 100 F and really high humidity... I also discovered I have some red sunburned knees from the canoe trip yesterday.!!

In terms of weather, we've had nothing but sunny weather since the bad rain in Pennsylvania. Jeesh, that was over a month ago. We had some overcast skies in Santa Fe, and some snow squalls at 14,000 feet on Mt. Evans, oh yes, and raindrops heading up to Rocky Mountain National Forest with Marc and Jess. But the rest of the time it has been clear blue and hot. Seems we were in a record of 109 in Texas..

This morning we got up to a leisurely breakfast (YUM) and got on the road at 10:30am. (embarrassingly late)..
We rode south from Eminence down route 19, a scenic byway through the Mark Twain National Forest. What a beautiful twisty ride. It was like riding down a ribbon of candy. No kidding.
We then headed east on route 160, and found out we had discovered another beautiful road in the Ozarks.
One caveat to all this backroad riding.. Don't expect to average much more than about 35-40mph. You may see 60+ on the speedometer from time to time, but when all is said and done the average speed is quite a bit slower. Also, right now is haying time, so the roads have lots of tractors and farm equipment on them..
We saw lots of motorcycles cruising on these roads, so we know this is a popular route with the local riders.

We finally stopped for gas after about 2 1/2 hours and 100 miles and had a soda at McD's. Jeannine was saying out loud that she didn't want to go to Poplar Bluff a "big city" .. The hostess said, "Oh, you can just take that road over there and the HH highway to Qulin..and you will be right at route 53 to the boot heel.."

For those of you who are not versed in the way Missouri names their roads, it goes like this. All state roads have numbers, like 18 or 142 and they are two lanes. The county roads have letters like "J", and they are always called "highways", like "J highway".. Bifurcations off a county road have two letter designations like "JA, JB etc." and can be really small roads. So when someone says "Take HH", that could be a one lane road with dirt sections, a true adventure. But she assured us "It's good road all the way".. Sounded good to us, so away we went... down route 142 to HH and right on to 53.. Another great road and we avoided a four lane once again!!

We were surprised to see how much rice is grown down here. We saw some corn, and wheat, but mostly flooded rice paddies and soybeans. Wow!! We also saw a huge tractor with treads like a caterpillar. First time I ever saw a John Deere like that!! This is Mississippi River bottomland in all its glory..

Finally we turned onto a four lane to go over the Mississippi River on Interstate 155. That is a big brown mean looking river, high on its banks. We pulled into a hotel in Dyersburg around 5pm and went immediately to the pool. Ahhh..

Harris and Jeannine