Trip Report Part Six

After leaving FDR State Park, we made three short drives and three overnight stops on our way to Arkansas and the Crater of Diamonds State Park.

Our first stop was Oak Mountain (Alabama) State Park.  We had been there before, so we knew it was a nice park. Alabama’s largest state park, Oak Mountain features a golf course, a lake with a nice swimming beach and an equestrian center.  It is also the home of the Alabama Wildlife Rehabilitation Center with rescued raptors that can be viewed from the tree top trail.  For us, the star of that show is a rare albino turkey vulture – shunned by other buzzards, and with feathers too brittle to fly well, she has lived at the center for years. We were pleased to learn that she is still there, outlasting a normal buzzard’s life expectancy in the wild.

Our next stop was Tombigbee State Park, just outside of Tupelo, MS. Google Maps sent us on a complicated series of poorly marked county roads that made us wonder if we would ever find the park.  Once there, we realized that if we had stayed on the interstate for one more exit we would have had an almost straight shot to the park entrance.  It is a nice enough park, and Elvis fans will know that he was born in Tupelo.  His birthplace and the church where he first sang in public are part of a tour of the city.

Tombigbee is derived from the Choctaw Indian word for “coffin makers,” named for tribesmen who cleaned the bones of the dead and placed them in boxes.  The Tombigbee River starts in northern Mississippi, and the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway allows for barge traffic between Tennessee and Mobile Bay.  There is even a Tombigbee Lake and campground at the Alabama-Coushatta Reservation at Livingston, TX.

After leaving Tombigbee, we crossed the Mississippi at Memphis and spent the night at Delta Ridge RV Park in Forrest City, AR.  This is a small park with additional sites under construction.  Almost everyone there was just there for a overnight stop.  It is located behind a pretty good restaurant which I think is owned by the same man who runs the park.

Crater of Diamonds tomorrow.