\

Wanderung 11

A Tantalizing Taste of the Texas Tropical Trail

January-February 2006

Epilog

The trip home consisted of one day driving from the Natchez Trace parkway to northeastern Tennessee and a second day driving from there back to our home in northern Virginia. Except for the extremely tricky drive out of our campground on ice-covered roads where jackknifing the trailer was a distinct possibility, the drive was long but uneventful. We even stayed in a campground on Sunday night that not only could refill our empty propane cylinder but also had wireless internet that we could use to check our email and cable TV on which we watched the winter Olympic Games from Torino, Italy. Still, it was good to get finally get home to Virginia.

I tied up two loose ends on this trip, completing the sale of the airplane and hauling the trailer back to Virginia. Admittedly, we took an extremely roundabout route to get back home, about 7,000 miles of driving total, but that way we visited our family in Dallas, saw a new corner of the U.S.A., and spent the worst part of winter down on the Tropical Trail of Texas where the weather was clement enough to get out and do things every day. Southern Louisiana, although still suffering some aftereffects of the hurricanes last season, was a very interesting pause in our trip back home. Similarly, although we bailed out of driving the last part of the Natchez Trace Parkway due to the weather, we saw most of it and liked it very much. The parkway would probably be a green tunnel in the spring or summer, and I imagine that the fall foliage season would be quite spectacular indeed. As we drove through eastern Tennessee we decided to skip the Smoky Mountains this time due to the unseasonably cold and snowy weather, but we certainly would like to revisit them on some future Wanderung.

Our expenses on this trip were noticeably lower than on other camping trips in the U.S., averaging about $60 per day rather than $70. That was almost certainly due to the fact that we did "dry" camping without electricity or water hookups for much of the trip. Down in Great Bend Park we learned that we could eke out almost a week of dry camping if we didn't have to use the trailer's propane furnace. That required using a booster battery and trying to minimize any unnecessary draw on the main battery, but it was possible. However, we also learned that when we had to heavily use the furnace the battery would last only one or at most two nights. For our next camping trip I would consider getting a larger RV battery to help that problem and might even look into buying a gasoline-powered generator. So stay tuned, Gentle Reader, for our further attempts to cope with extended dry camping on future Wanderungs!

Copyright 2006 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Prolog Map Epilog

January 06
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
8 9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28
29 30 31
February 2006
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8 9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28

Return to the Wanderungs Homepage.
Sign the Guestbook or Read the Guestbook.
Comments about this site? Email the Webmaster.
Contact Bob and Monika at bob_monika@hotmail.com.