Road Trips and Hike Reports

St Clarisville OH was really an inexpensive convenient alternative to staying at the Wheeling Island Casino in Wheeling WV.  We went to the casino late Sunday night so our start Monday morning wasn't very early.  The drive home was partly up OH-7, a highway which very closely follows the scenic but sometimes industrial Ohio river for hundreds of miles along Ohio's border with West Virginia and Indiana amongst a few other states I think.  We took it from St Clairsville to East Liverpool or about 60 miles.  From there I tried OH-170 north out of East Liverpool about 30 slow but scenic miles until Petersburg Ohio, along the Pennsylvania border.  From there we took local roads North and East going past the bizarrely named municipality of S.N.J.P Pennsylvania , the first few paragraphs at least of the Wikipedia page about it are worth reading. Next up we drove on the farthest North (and free) 20 miles of PA-376, a road generally associated closely with tolls and Pitt...

On a previous trip across country (on the way home from Oregon with hope chests I think) I had stopped at Martin State forest off US-50 in Indiana and wanted to come back when we could hike there.  So when we were getting to the end of our planned time in Memphis I played with routes and decided our trip home could swing through this scenic hilly part of Indiana. Martin State forest was only an hour from Jasper so we hiked in the late morning after a leisurely start from our hotel.  There is a hike in Alltrails in Martin State Forest but I wanted to go back to the exact spot I had been before and hoped to find a good trail from there.  We found some trails for sure but the trail map wasn't super helpful and Alltrails only had a map for one of the trails that passed through that section of the park. We tried following signs (shown below) for some lake that was 1 mile away but the trail soon branched and headed steeply downhill in the direction we went and going the other ...

Our trip out of Memphis started with a breakfast at Panera Bread near Bartlett Tennessee.  After that we drove along US-51, US-70 and US-79 through Paris TN and eventually to near Dover TN to go north on TN-49.  TN-49 leads through the southern half of the Land Between the Lakes Recreation area.  I had driven through LBL on 'the Trace' several times, once with Brian even I think.  This trip finally was more than just a scenic drive as we took time to enjoy a few sites along 'the Trace'.  Also, I'd always come into the Trace either from the North or started in the middle and gone north along the prominently marked parts of the byway.  What I suspected and we verified this trip is that the road south of US-68, which Tennessee mostly just calls TN-49, actually goes through an entire other section of the LBL area and is in fact, like the more well known northern half which is mostly in Kentucky, almost devoid of houses or businesses.  It's just a recreatio...

Thursday we left Nashville and headed for Memphis.  We took TN-100 most of the way and it was a relaxing drive for Brian.  We stopped at Herb Parsons Lake, a favorite West TN hike for me, but there were signs about storm damage and not recommending trail use so we didn't hike.  Then I was a little confused and was thinking it was Holly Springs that was a super nice small town in Mississippi that would be good to visit.  Now I realize it's Oxford that is the picture perfect town, Holly Springs is a very small place with very little going on.  Still, we walked the town square and had a very rustic Southern style lunch buffet from a place called Southern Eatery .  I enjoyed the baked chicken, seasoned potatoes, squash and especially the black-eyed peas served in a very old building that almost felt like a saloon inside.  Brian didn't love the food overall but he did love the ice-box lemon pie he chose for desert. It was late when we arrived at our hotel ...

Today was our urban Nashville day.  We started off heading downtown on the bus.  The bus was easy to figure out and clean.  It dropped us off at a transit center directly diagonal from my old workplace, the Andrew Jackson Building on Charlotte Pike.  I was impressed that the transit center has clearly marked restrooms that were actually open, something most big cities seem incapable of sustaining.  My old work building hasn't lost any charm (it never had any) but it doesn't look any worse either.   The first thing I wanted to visit was The Arcade, an early covered but not enclosed shopping area that has been around for over 100 years.  It was essentially a lunch time food court when I worked in Nashville and from the website I was hopeful it still had a variety of places to eat but at a minimum I knew it had ' Ugly Bagel '.   Unfortunately, Ugly Bagel is literally the only thing open before lunch and probably one of maybe 3 things in th...

Monday morning we packed up from the state park cabin and had breakfast and did laundry and had breakfast at a charming cafe in Camden TN.  The rest of the day was spent having fun and getting to Nashville in the evening.  We had a really adventurous dinner at Inchin’s Bamboo pan-Asian cafe near our hotel. Savage Gulf (or as I more often think of it, the Stone Door) is an amazing area in SE Tennessee where the elevated Cumberland Plateau gives way to a deep river valley.  With our friend from Vermont not joining us on this trip we’ve juggled our to-do list to fit our solo trip.  This hike would have otherwise probably happened the day after we left Memphis but going as a day trip from Nashville meant going when there were only a few cars in the parking lot instead of weekend crowds. The drive there took us out along US-70S, much of which is an expressway now.  I don’t remember the route I used to take but this was a different way to go and it was nice seeing t...