Friday October 8th 2021

It was another foggy start to the day. Visibility during the first few hours of daylight was very low. I could see the RV across the street, but the ones at the top of the hill less than a couple hundred feet away were hidden in the fog. It took until 9:30 or so for the sun to burns off the morning fog.

The fog slowed my preparation for travel down a little. It created more of a mental slowness rather than an actual obstacle to preparation. I knew I wouldn’t leave until visibility improved. I pull off my site shortly before 10:30am to the boat launch parking lot. I used that space to hook up the car for towing. It was around 10:45 when I pulled out of the campground. That was about forty five minutes later than my plan.

My destination was two hundred miles to the west. The combination of the holiday weekend and school vacations next week made it difficult to find a reservation to the east along my intended direction of travel. I probably checked a dozen places online and two by phone without success. I chose to return to Sam’s Town Casino RV Park in the Tunica Mississippi area along the Mississippi River. It had plenty of space when I stayed during the month of August and it isn’t a place that families with kids are going to be camping. There are more sites occupied tonight than I saw any of the nights I was here in August, but there are still plenty of available sites.

The route to get here was a straight drive across northern Alabama and northern Mississippi. Most of the drive was on US72 a good divided highway with a few traffic lights and a couple of major communities to deal with. Next week I’ll return east on the same road to continue my journey east toward Jacksonville FL.

I had one stop for gas along the way that was relatively easy as gas stops go. I only had to circle the pumps once before I found a nice end island pump available. Gas was a little more expensive than my last fill up at $2.899 a gallon. Two other events highlighted my journey. I passed an accident that had happened a few minutes ahead of my arrival. There was an overturned vehicle in the middle of the road. There were plenty of people stopped to help and it didn’t look like there were any serious injuries. I had to drive partially in the median to safely pass the incident. It is not fun to encounter accidents, but my day wasn’t anywhere near as bad as the people in the overturned vehicle.

The other event was a wrong turn near the end of my journey. I’m going to blame bad signage, because I knew right away that I made a wrong turn when I should have continued straight. The signs indicated that Interstate 269 was ending and Interstate 69 and 55 north exited to the right. I found myself on Interstate 69 north along with 55 north. The road I needed to be on was Interstate 69 south. There were no signs for 69 south or the towns I was heading for. I needed to make a U turn at the next significant exit and backtrack to correct my mistake. Throughout all of this traffic heading north into Memphis was very heavy. Overall it probably added ten to fifteen minutes to my journey.

I arrived at Sam’s Town Casino RV park shortly after 3PM and got checked in at the hotel lobby before continuing on to my site in the RV park.