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!