Fall Color Cruise

Since our last blog entry about Chattanooga, we moved down river to Rogersville, AL where we stayed at Joe Wheeler State Park Marina, an Alabama state park and resort. Wheeler has a beautiful lodge with many rooms, a golf course, tennis courts, a pool, a marina, hiking and camping facilities. We were there for a rendezvous of the “American Great Loop Cruisers Association”. This was a great week of meeting other “loopers”, going to seminars, eating, games, food, visiting, and more food. Over two hundred other loopers attended the rendezvous. So, in case you were wondering, we’re not the only “crazies” doing this “around the eastern US and Canada” boat trip. The major difference is that most people do it in one year whereas we are in our seventh year. Why so slow? Remember we were still working full time the first five years and now we’ve already traveled enough extra miles on side trips to double the usual total mileage and we are only half way through the loop! The red on the map shows where we have traveled that is considered part of the loop and the yellow shows the extra miles we've traveled for our trip. The black shows the normal way to continue to complete the loop, but I'm sure we'll add many more miles then shown. At the end of the week we took a one-day tour with many other loopers to nearby Huntsville, AL. The tour included a visit to the US Space Museum, the Huntsville Botanical Gardens, the Huntsville Museum of Art, and then a BBQ dinner at a riverfront marina. The entire tour was spectacular!

After this week of “work” and festivities at Wheeler State Park, our friends, Bob & Kathy from Saugatuck, MI, came to visit. We anchored out one night near Wheeler Park, then moved up river about fifty miles to Ditto Landing, a marina near Huntsville. It was wonderful to have them come for a visit. Unfortunately, their visit was much too short, but we sure had lots of laughter and fun together. We shuffled their car and our truck at both ends of their visit, getting them safely on their way back home in their car and getting our truck back to where we wanted to leave it for now. Trying to move our truck around as our boat progresses on the rivers is another new adventure for us. We need it next week to drive to Nashville, TN to get to the airport. Yes, we’re jumping ship for three weeks to visit our daughter, son-in-law, and grandson in Amsterdam and to welcome our new granddaughter-to-be when she is born, anticipated next week. But who knows exactly when she’ll come?

After Bob and Kathy left, we moved on up river past Chattanooga and on to Knoxville, TN and then to the end of the navigable portion of the Tennessee River. We had to travel an extra 560 miles when we backtracked from Dayton, TN and Chattanooga to go to Wheeler Park for the rendezvous, but it was definitely worth it.

The last few weeks we have had unbelievable breath-taking views of fall foliage on mountains and on riverbanks. By moving upriver and then down again during this time of the year, we have expanded the time period for our seeing the best fall colors. It seems that each bend in the river brings us another “picture-taking” view. We are constantly amazed at the natural beauty of our country. Rather than ramble on about the wonderful foliage, we’ll take advantage of the quote, “a picture is worth a thousand words” and let you see the “real thing”. We hope you enjoy this visual tour of “fall at it’s finest”.