FLORIDA! We made it to Florida and are staying in Pensacola tonight. Temps in the 70s today and lows in the high 50s tonight. There are strong winds forecast for tomorrow and again Sunday, but we’re in the Intercoastal Waterway now, so the waves and wind should not bother us very much. Mobile Bay was big enough to have serious waves, but we left early this morning and were out of the bay before any waves developed. On the way through Mobile Bay, we met a monstrous oil platform rig which had been refloated and was running under it’s own power like a ship that was a city block square and a city block high. It’s hard to gauge the size from this picture, but there is a 35 ft. Coastguard patrol boat on the right side next to it as an escort (between our bow rail and the oil rig). You might have to click on this picture, which loads a bigger size picture) to even see the Coast Guard boat.

The Intercoastal Waterway is a nicely marked, well dredged canal connecting the many bays and natural tide channels behind the barrier islands along the coast. The picture is the ICW leaving Mobile and the restaurant along the side of the canal is “Lulu’s” (jimmy Buffet’s sister). It was 10 AM when we passed, so we didn’t stop in for lunch, but it’s supposed to be very good food. Most of the barrier islands here are National Seashore islands of white sand, salt marshes, pine trees and palm trees. If we had time and nice weather, I’d love to go anchor close to them and walk the beaches, but we expect plenty of that in December and January farther south and in the Keys.

Here we are in shirtsleeve weather and our daughter, Ann, is moving to her new house in Chicago tomorrow (12/1) and they expect a foot of snow. Sorry Ann! At least the new house is beautiful. I hope Mike can make it down to help, and maybe bring his snow blower. I did service the snow blowers before we left in October and they should run fine.

We plan to stay here tomorrow and go to Ft. Walton Beach and Destin on Saturday. With gale force winds forecast for Sunday, we’ll probably stay an extra day there too. Currently, we’re about one day ahead of schedule on our Cruise Plan.

We’re leaving Mobile tomorrow (11/30) for Pensacola, FL. Mobile has been very nice and an interesting stop. Temps have been in the mid to high 70s, just beautiful.

We spent most of yesterday touring the battleship Alabama, now permanently docked and restored for tours here in Mobile. Sorry I forgot my camera! It is utterly awesome how large, complex and powerful a battleship really is. John and Ben S. could probably spend a week there. All the original equipment is onboard and set up as “ready to go” including the 5 ft. tall 2 ton main gun shells all racked inside the turret base with mechanical lifts for the powder sacks and shells to feed the big guns. There is room after room of galley, dining rooms (to feed 2,500 men) soda fountain, tightly packed bunk quarters, ship’s hospital, machine rooms, engine roome, the command center with the giant glass circle for plotting all ships in the area (just like in the movies), huge generators, al whole room full of 2-way radios (John S. favorites), huge turbine engines……..it goes on forever!

Today we visited Bellengrath Gardens, which is a spectacular home, estate and gardens of a mid 20th century businessman in Mobile. He bought one of the first Coca Cola bottling franchises in the South and made millions bottling Coke. He and his wife had no children, so they left their huge estate and 60 acre gardens to a trust to be on permanent public display. The trust has plenty of funds to keep the gardens really beautiful. It was a mid-70s day and the flowers were in bloom in many parts of the gardens. They were just finishing setting up for their annual Christmas lights extravaganza, and expected over a thousand visitors to walk the pathways tonight, but there were only a dozen or so when we were there. The home was also interesting. 100% of their furnishings from the 1950s and all of their antique collections were there. WOW!












We ate at a couple of good seafood restaurants. Good seafood is plentiful here, of course. Downtown Mobile was a Ho Hum, but you can’t have everything.


There are black crowned night herons here every night on the pilings at the dock. They are about 2 ft. long and they fly in every night just after dusk to sit on the pilings near the lights all night to swoop down to eat fish they see in the harbor. They have fairly large eyes for herons. I have been trying to take a picture of one for 3 nights, but the camera flash won’t reach 15 feet to the piling they favor and when we shine our big spotlight on them, they fly off. I can just imagine them telling the other herons “Damn tourists with the searchlights….now I’m blinded by that light and can’t see to catch fish for an hour!” This picture is the best I could do.

Saltwater! We made it to Mobile! That’s my first picture of a sunset over saltwater for this trip. We’re staying here at Dog River Marina for a few days. We now have to think about tides and currents here, so things are a little different. Luckily, our GPS has complete local actual and forecast tide information by time and date so it’s easier to plan and understand the effects. (actually, it wasn’t luck, it was planning….that’s one of the reasons I bought this GPS unit). It was great to have the GPS too because we really had to watch our position in the channel at Mobile Bay. The bay is huge, about 25 miles long and 10 miles wide. The main shipping channel is wide and 40 to 50 ft. deep, but we were surprised to find that the depth of the channel that crosses from the main channel to Dog River is only about 6 ft deep at low tide. There are many parts of the bay that are just too shallow to go into. Our paper charts don’t include that part of Mobile Bay, so Kathy was uncomfortable and made me go really slow the whole way. She’s great with charts and navigation and is used to following the paper charts and spotting buoy numbers with binocs to match the charts positions, so without that paper in her hand to look at to confirm the GPS, she’s uncomfortable. This is the only 10 mile stretch out of 6,000 miles for which we do not have paper charts.

Coming as no surprise, we’re not a “big” boat anymore. Here at Dog River there are at least 5 53MY Hatteras like ours plus a large number of much larger boats: 60 ft. SportFish, 70 ft. Hatteras MY, 60 to 80 ft. sailboats……dozens of bigger boats. Of course there are tens of dozens of smaller boats too. Everything you can imagine is here.

I got to update my Great Loop Route map with our red line going all the way to Mobile. Some fun!

Last stop before salt water……..Bates Lake, which is about 55 river miles up the Black Warrior and Mobile rivers from Mobile. The highlight of the day was passing through the last lock at Coffeeville today. No more locks until we pass New York City and go up the Hudson. Owing to all the swampy land and high river banks in Alabama, there are very few places to anchor where you can get out of the navigation channel and Bates Lake gets us completely out of the river into a creek estuary (not really a lake). The lake is completely cypress swamp one side and lined with fishing shacks and summer cottages on the other side.

With temps in the low 70s, I thought it would be fun to dinghy back up the main river channel to take Daisy to a big beach we saw about a mile before we turned in to Bates Lake. WRONG! The beach was neat but you couldn’t leave the sand near the river without getting near the grasses and raising clouds of mosquitoes. Even though we never got bitten, that turned into a quick trip.

The one neat picture is of a giant cypress tree with hanging Spanish moss hanging down and reflecting in the perfectly mirror smooth water of the little lake.

Thanksgiving day! WE started out in Demopolis, AL and are now anchored out in the wilds of the Black Warrior river 145 river miles north of Mobile AL. Kathy bought a 9 lb. turkey and cooked a full Thanksgiving dinner for us with turkey, mashed potatoes, outside dressing,. What is not shown in the picture is that she also made 2 pies for desert…a chocolate mousse pie (my favorite) and a pumpkin pie. Yum……! We’re thankful for our health, our love, our families and our friends. Now if God could also just guide the misguided people in many parts of this world, it’d help a lot.

We’re anchored in Bashi Creek which runs into the Black Warrior river. It’s large enough and deep enough to get in but we needed to stretch ourselves between bow and stern anchors so we wouldn’t drift over and run aground on the sides of the creek at night. There are very few places like this where you can get out of the navigation channel of the river to anchor, and exactly zero marinas anywhere near here. Luckily, there are also very few boats so we got in alone tonight. There were 2 boats anchored with us 2 nights ago at Sumter Landing. Like Sumter Landing, there is a small boat ramp at the creek entrance so it’s easy to land our dinghy to take Daisy and there’s a little park where people can fish and camp here (but there’s nobody doing that). From the bluff at the little park you can see up the Black Warrior river for a couple miles. As you can see, it’s a very large, wide river and easy to navigate. It probably travels2 river miles for evertyy mile we go South because of all of the oxbows and curves in the river, but that makes it pretty. I would say we saw about 4 or 5 boats all day after we left the Demopolis lock. There was one barge towboat that we passed, but no other commercial traffic. Just us and the river.

Tomorrow we’ll go through the last lock before salt water. No more locks until after New York City on the Hudson river! We’ll be in Mobile on Saturday.

We’re staying at Demopolis, AL tonight after cruising 60 miles on the river and one lock. We passed “the white cliffs of Epes today, a local interest point near Epes, AL. They’re a very light colored, hard, clay-like material that erodes into interesting shapes over the years. Not exactly the white cliffs of Dover, but it’s all Epes, AL has to brag about, and worth a picture. There was a VERY solid dark grey clay stuck to our anchor this morning when we hauled it up. It took us 10 minutes to scrape and hose it off before we left the park. I wonder if that’s the same stuff?

We hardly saw a boat all day, except for one cruiser and one towboat. The tow had 4 barges full of wood chips which they said were “for that paper mill down below Demopolis, which I believe may be Tom D’s Boise plant in Alabama. They certainly can stack the barges high wit wood chips when they ship them like this. It’s nice to run all day with no other boat traffic because I have to slow down to reduce my wake so I won’t rock the other boats by “waking them”.

The Demopolis Marina is big, well staffed, can handle lots of services, and full of boats. We got one of the few transient slips still available. Last week, they were rafting boats here while everybody waited for two locks to reopen. There are lots of turtles under the docks and people at the marina restaurant throw french fries into the water to feed the turtles. Some of them are large snapping turtles. It’s the Alabama version of feeding the ducks at the Millrace Inn in St. Charles.

We’ll be anchoring out for the next two nights, probably without cell phone service or internet service, and then we’ll be in Mobile and in salt water for the first time.

We anchored out at a beautiful little park along the Ten-Tom Canal. The park is the Sumter Landing Recreation Area in Alabama. A very nicely done park with 2 RV campgrounds, 6 tent camping campgrounds, right on the water, a boat ramp, picnic facilities, etc. Daisy loved the dinghy rides to the boat ramp and long walks in the park with lots of nice animal tracks to smell. We enjoyed the peaceful views and calm anchorage. Two other boats came in and anchored with us before nightfall. They were gone at dawn before we took Daisy in the morning, and they never saw the pretty little park. They got farther down river than we did today, but we enjoyed life in the slow lane.

We’re at Marina Cove Marina, which is near nuthin’, Alabama. Just ain’t nuthin’ here except the really small marina (that picture is the whole marina and the other is the “marina office”. No cell phone service anywhere all day on the water and none here. Oh well, it’s only $34 to stay overnight.

However, you can go see the Bevill lock, a fake southern mansion museum, and a restored steam powered sternwheeler riverboat by walking up the road a mile or two, which we did. We did not see one car on the road the whole time. It’s kind of fun strolling along the yellow stripes in the middle of the road.

The faux mansion is just an honorarium for Tom Bevill, a US congressman whom got the money for the lock, the museum (which displays his trophies and a few random other things about the Ten-Tom) plus the decommissioned and restored sternwheeler stump and snag puller boat The Montgomery. The Montgomery was really worth seeing. It was totally restored (your US tax dollars at work!) and open so you could walk through it and see the two huge steam boilers (84 tons each) and all of the machinery necessary to run the boat. John S. would have loved it. It also had the original working steam whistle, which you can blow by stepping on the whistle pedal in the pilot house. Kathy didn’t do that, but you can bet I did. WOW! I wish I had one of those on Nonchalance!

We drove to Oxford, MS today….a very pretty and quaint almost touristy type of town, but without the T-shirt stores or fudge shops. It had a real town square with a huge old courthouse and city hall. Nice little shops, the oldest department store in the south (est. 1838) and even a culinary and kitchen gadget specialty store (Kathy’s favorite type of store). We just walked all around the square and poked into the various stores. We got Habanero fudge sauce (yep…chili and chocolate), pear vinegar, cabernet vinegar and an absolutely huge cinnamon roll with lots of white icing, which I’ll warm up for breakfast tomorrow . Yumm……

Oxford, MS is also the location of Rowan Oak, William Faulkner’s home. Faulkner (Pulitzer Prize winning author, i.e. The Sound and the Fury) lived most of his adult life in Oxford. His home is almost exactly as he left it, including furnishings, pictures on the wall, his typewriter, boots, etc. Very interesting. In the room where he frequently wrote, the initial outline, by day, of his book The Fable is written on the wall in Faulkner’s own hand, left there when he finished and moved on. See pic.

Tomorrow’s our last day on Columbus because the 2 closed locks are finally supposed to reopen.

We visited Waverly Mansion here in Columbus, MS. It’s an antebellum southern plantation on 40 acres of what used to be a 6,000 acre plantation growing cotton and corn and supplying sawed lumber to the area. It was built by Colonel James Young in 1853. He oversaw the signing of the treaty with the indians which opened this whole area to the US. He was granted land purchase rights and bought 40,000 acres of land. He sold off 34,000 and kept 6,000 acres for his plantation on the Tombigbee river. He built the mansion and many other buildings, forming a small town of his own in the area of his plantation.

The antebellum mansion is really interesting. It has a huge (40’ X 40’) central hall with a four story open space with walkways and hand carved mahogany railings and hand turned mahogany spindles around each of the 3 successively smaller walkways on the higher floors, the fourth being a large cupola for viewing the landscape of the plantation. It also has incredible plaster frieze work of acanthus leaves in every ceiling medallion, fancy ceiling cornices and the original gasiliers (gas chandeliers, now electrified) that operated from a methane production shed outside the house.

The antebellum homes here were not destroyed in the Civil War because of the rivers and swamps that kept Sherman’s army from reaching them and completing their assigned mission of destroying all towns and plantations in Mississippi and other states. The Union Army just simply couldn’t get here.

This mansion was occupied by the Young’s family until about 1900. It fell into disuse and then disrepair until in the late 1950’s when it was completely overgrown by the forest, taken over by possums, bats, and the occasional hunters, who set up burn barrels in the center of the great hall to stay warm. It was also the site of many local fraternity and sorority parties in the 1950s. Then, in 1961, it was purchased by the current owner, Mr. Snow. He is a local antique dealer, not particularly wealthy, and he and his wife spent 40 years restoring the mansion to its current state, which is very nice. The guide explained how the couple had to spend a whole year picking mud dauber wasp nests out of the plaster friezes with toothpicks and toothbrushes so as not to damage the original plaster work. Mr. Snow, now 81, still lives there and continues to work on the house. The exterior, which was probably done first, needs it again, but the interior is really beautiful. He also filled it with period antiques which were fairly inexpensive in the 1960s and 70s, so you get a chance to see what it would have looked like before the Civil War.

The grounds had massive, 250 year old magnolia trees (one is the largest magnolia in the state) and boxwood bushes descended from the original boxwood bush lined garden walks of Colonel Young.

Today, I bought Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson, a book on the Civil War, recommended by an anonymous comment on my blog entry about our visit to Shiloh. The small bookstore in town had a whole large section on the Civil War and the young clerk at the store knew the author’s name as soon as I mentioned the title. You gott’a know we’re down South. Even Kathy, a good Southern girl, said “Huh?” when I first mentioned the book. I guess Texas isn’t as “into” the Civil War as is Mississippi.

SO we’re not going to Demopolis for a while after all! We are in Columbus, MS and we found out when we got here that everybody else had the same idea as us about staying in Demopolis, plus a lot of boaters insurance will not let them get to salt water before late November, so they're rafting them 4 deep at Demopolis. "Rafting" is when they tie boats to the dock and then tie more boats up to the sides of those boats. Luckily, we got a very nice 70 ft. slip at a good price with electric, water, internet, etc. and got an Enterprise rental car for a week. In addition, the friends we were cruising with before (the Loose Stones) said they really liked Columbus, so this may be much better than Demopolis and we’ll still be on our Cruise Plan after we pass Demopolis and Coffeeville, arriving at Mobile sometime around Nov. 25th. As an eerie coincidence, here we are in Columbus and a full scale operating replica of Columbus’ ship, The Nina, is docked here too. They’re passing through on their way to Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Seeing what it’s like, I can’t imagine going across the Atlantic with no charts in that boat in 1492, but they did.

We had an easy day cruising today. For the one lock that we went through, we called ahead on VHF a mile before we got there and they were open and waiting for us when we arrived.

The Ten-Tom canal was dug through the Tombigbee river in this area and the Army Corps of Engineers used the flatlands and swamps created by the river and straightened it out by digging the canal straight through the area instead of following the many oxbows of the original river. See the picture of the chart page. It’s like that for miles and miles. This also created many beautiful bays and cutoffs from the main channel like the one pictured. It’s the old river channel that was bypassed but is still connected to the Ten-Tom canal. In most places where they cut off an oxbow, they also filled in one of the ends so there is no flow through the old bend, just a large river bend with only one end connected to the canal system. Looks like excellent fishing and great places to build a house with a great dock, but then you’ve gotta’ live in Backwaters, Mississippi……. and it’s so hard to get a good brie here………

We’re at Aberdeen Marina in Aberdeen, MS tonight, after an easy cruising day with beautiful, warm, sunny weather. It got up to 78 degrees this afternoon. This is the first day in a long time that we have run the boat from our flybridge, which, except for a bimini sunshade, is open to the weather.

The entrance to the Aberdeen Marina is an unnerving, twisting and turning narrow channel through a cypress swamp. The water on either side of the channel is obviously one to two feet deep and full of logs and cypress knees, with only the thin red and green channel marker poles to mark it. While I would call it an extremely well marked channel, it’s still creepy to go through. In the picture shown, the channel goes straight back towards the grassy shore and there are 3 red and 3 green thin marker poles visible.

The marina itself is small but very nice and they have a free courtesy car for transient boaters to drive into town. The courtesy car is a huge 1980’s white Lincoln Town Car…. A veritable land yacht. Not everything on the car works, but it’s free and it got us there and back. I believe we could have seated four people across on that front bench seat. We went to the Big Star market to buy a few groceries.

The locks on the Ten-Tom have been really great compared to what we’re used to in Illinois. We usually count on an average one hour wait at locks before we can get in. We have waited up to 4 ½ hours for locks and once averaged 4 hours per lock on a 2 day trip through 4 locks. On the Ten-Tom, we have usually either gone right in when we got there or have waited a matter or 5 to 10 minutes. At the locks today, two were zero wait and one was 55 minutes. Yesterday all three locks we did were zero wait. We also really like using the floating bollards at the locks, which they always let you do here. They are very large heavy floating drums in a sealed channel at the side of the lock. They have huge cleats to tie your boat to so when the water goes up or down, your boat just follows it easily. Instead of 2 people holding on to ropes dropped from the top of the lock at the bow and stern of the boat. The “floaters” are much easier.

We are in Midway Marina, halfway through the Ten-Tom canal going towards the Tombigbee river. There’s a TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) park in walking distance, but nothing else worth seeing. The Midway Marina is near Fulton, MS, which is near nuthin’ at all, and as far as we can tell, is almost nuthin’ at all itself. There are cypress swamps along the rivers, one of which is pictured. These are really just flooded land where cypress trees have started growing in the shallows, making their own beginnings of future cypress swamps. In one of these, right next to our marina, we saw a pileated woodpecker this evening. It’s absolutely huge and has a very large red cockade behind its head so that it looks like it has a beak on both sides of it’s head. It also makes a very loud, low drumming when it pecks at dead trees.

We walked over to see the TVA park and it had a very nice visitor center explaining about construction of the canal. It’s the largest canal in the world in terms of the amount of earth excavated to make it…..bigger than the Suez Canal and the Panama Canal!

There are lots of locks here. One of the three we went through today had an 85 ft. drop. By the time you’re at the bottom, you feel like a sardine in a very large sardine can. That’s a picture from the top of one of today’s locks. You can see the lower river way beyond and way down from the water in the lock. We’ll go through 3 more locks tomorrow and will stay at Aberdeen Marina, which is supposed to have the lowest diesel fuel prices around these parts. Since we run at fairly slow speeds on the rivers and canals, we have been getting better fuel mileage, so I have not refueled for a long time, waiting for Aberdeen. I hope they’re not out when we get there!

We had our usual Sunday morning breakfast today…..donuts and coffee and read the Sunday paper. There’s a small “Big Star” grocery store near the marina that has a bakery/deli and they make really good donuts. I also discovered that they have an early morning breakfast bar set up with sausage, scrambled eggs, grits and waffles. While I was there, about half a dozen men came in to get breakfast to go (in a brown bag and each had a pickup truck, wore blue jeans with a wide belt, a tight black T-shirt, and a plaid wool shirt. It’s like they had on the official local uniform, even though they clearly didn’t know each other.

Lots of people refer to people doing the Great Circle Route as Loopers……“Great Loop Route” is more common than “Great Circle Route”, I find. We learned from other Loopers that 2 locks further south between here and Mobile will be closed for maintenance from 11/14 through 11/20. One is at Pickensville and one at Coffeeville. The boat 2 slips down from us here at Grand Harbor marina is a local resident, but he’s taking his 65 ft. Marquis down to Orange Beach, AL just East of Mobile for the winter. He is leaving Wednesday to beat the lock closings and make it through to Mobile by 11/14. The couple we were cruising with on the Ohio are also going to speed up to beat the lock closings. However, we’ve decided to stick with our original plan which will take us through the Pickensville lock before 11/14 and will leave us stuck between locks for the one week in and around Demopolis. We can stay at Demopolis and cruise the Black Warrior river if we want. Then we can pass the Coffeeville lock after 11/20. Kathy says she read that a number of cruisers bring their boats down to Demopolis to spend the winter, so there should be good boat facilities. As long as they don’t discover more problems once they start working on the Coffeeville lock and decide to close it longer, this fits our schedule fine.

So we decided to stay another day here at Grand Harbor and look at real estate, just for fun. Since we’re now far enough south that people don’t have to winterize their boats, it’d be interesting to consider either having a home or a condo with a boat dock down here. We were directed to a local real estate mogul……actually the guy that built this huge marina and condo property. He gave us 3 hours of his time and drove us all around the area, showing us many of the possibilities, plus he has lived here all of his life and is a fount of information on the area. We saw homes and empty lots with spectacular views (like the one of 3 states out of our front windshield below) and got an excellent understanding of the area from this gentleman. No sales pitch at all, even tough many of them were his properties. We did see 2 beautiful lots right on the water in a beautiful cove, out of the waves, for about $500K. They are in a new fancy sub-development. Kathy says if we ever do buy a new house, she wants a bare lot so she can design it herself. We both think we’re most likely to stay in Illinois and just bring the boat south in the winters. But it was fun to look and we had the perfect host to show us around. We may do the same thing further south too, so we can compare.

It was another bright sunny day and driving through the countryside in these fall colors is really beautiful. I didn’t know Mississippi and Alabama had such gorgeous foliage in the fall.

We drove to Huntsville, AL today, about 2 hours away, to see NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center museum. Huntsville is the site where many of the large rockets and capsules were built for the Apollo missions and also for today’s space shuttles. NASA has a sprawling exhibit over about 40 acres displaying parts of their huge collection of obsolete missiles, space capsules, rocket engines, space suits, the backup moon rover, a moon rock, etc. with an IMAX theater showing Apollo missions to the moon and the Mars rover project, plus there is a “Space Camp” for school children to participate in astronaut type training over a period of days.

It also has a strange collection of other seemingly unrelated things like a Blackbird spy plane, UH1H Vietnam era helicopter, a motorcycle built by Orange County Choppers dedicated to space exploration (a disturbing use of federal tax dollars to build a display for this even though I’m sure Orange County Choppers donated the bike as a publicity stunt), and army recruiting stations.

Overall the space related items and rocket historical engineering parts and pieces were very interesting and the museum was very worthwhile to see. The upkeep of the museum buildings, grounds and displays leave something to be desired, but that’s the status of things like this competing for tax dollars with other federal programs. The huge size of these items is amazing. The upright rocket in the picture with Kathy is just a Saturn I. There’s a Saturn V rocket that’s far too large to display upright and it is on its side in 6 big pieces that is substantially longer than a city block. Even on its side, it’s about 30 ft. tall!

I had taken the corroded cast iron riser manifold from my port engine to a local welding shop so I would have a spare pipe in case one of the other 3 on the boat develops the same problem. The welder was highly recommended by a very large full service marina about one mile down the Ten-Tom canal from us. He did an excellent job jacketing the corroded parts with ¼ inch steel pipe and brazing it to the cast iron. He had to heat the whole large pipe almost to red hot with his torch first to prevent stress cracks from forming in the cast iron if it were heated just where he was welding. I hope I never need it, but it’s now $295 worth of insurance for parts that are impossible to get.

We saw Shiloh, National Military Park, today. It was an extremely interesting, well done and even deeply moving experience. It was a beautiful, bright, sunny but cool day and the fall colors were at their peak here, unlike the spring days of the April, 1862 battles. The battlefields were well marked, well cared for and sometimes filled with monuments erected after the war by various states involved. It’s a National Park, so the park rangers are NPS rangers. They had sold out of the self-led car and walking tour CD at the bookstore so one of the park rangers loaned us a copy of the CD he had. The CD explained the battle and battlefields really well, guiding us away from the normal geographical progression car tour path to many tour points taken in a battle chronology point of view. Actual quotes from battle participant’s memoirs and army records added to the realism and understanding of the significance of this 2 day battle where more American lives were lost than in the entire Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Mexican war. There were 23,746 killed, wounded or missing in action. The bravery and resolve of both sides was stunning, considering that practically none had experienced battle before, and the vagaries of war and pure luck played equal parts with both brilliant and poor military strategy. And yes, Jay, Grant did say "Retreat, No!, I propose to attack at daylight and whip them", and with Buell's army helping, he did so, even after Beauregard had wired home that the Union Army suffered a complete defeat and the Confederacy had won.

The picture is one of “the sunken road”, called the “hornet’s nest” by the Confederates due to the constant buzzing sounds of bullets and shrapnel flying through the air near them. The park, understandably, is the largest collection of actual Civil War cannon in the world.

What wasn’t covered, but what we talked about over and over as we walked these hallowed grounds, was what drove the ordinary men to enlist so eagerly and fight so gallantly for the Union and Confederate sides. Just to say that the South wanted states rights and to preserve a way of life, and the North wanted to preserve the union, is to oversimplify the human dynamics, but we didn’t resolve anything in our discussion today either.