It rained all night last night. We are thinking seriously about just
staying in the hotel today. What can we do in all this rain?
I found an advertisement for the
Mississippi Museum of Natural Science.
It is not too far from where we are staying. (Well, Jackson is just
not that big.) Anyway, the museum was interesting. It has both an
indoor and an outdoor setting. The indoor setting includes dioramas
depicting Mississippi wildlife, an aquarium, and a reptile room with
live alligators and turtles. There is also a rotating temporary
exhibit, and at the time we visited, it was an exhibition of the
photography of Mississippi native
Stephen Kirkpatrick,
who has written several books.
The exhibit included not only his photographs of Amazon wildlife,
but also tapes that let you hear the jungle in all its cacophony.
The outdoor portion includes walks along several trails through
swamps. They promise lots of wildlife, but other than a group of
turtles on a log and several lizards on a stairway, all we
encountered were more biting bugs.
Then we continued up the Natchez Trace Parkway toward Tupelo.
But it started raining again, there were more tornado warnings,
and the road, as beautiful as it is, got boring. We decided to
get off the parkway and head north toward Memphis. We were
disappointed that in Natchez there were no river cruises. We
hope to find a riverboat ride in Memphis. Also, the storms seem
to be originating in west Mississippi and Louisiana, then moving
across Mississippi to the southeaster toward the gulf. So maybe
we can escape the rain by heading north.
Late tonight we arrived in the Memphis area. We found a motel in
West Memphis, across the Mississippi river in Arkansas.
