After eight days camped outside of repair shops, we are definitely ready for a more picturesque campground. We found a city park in Pontotoc, Mississippi, that will go down on our list of favorites. The Howard Stafford Park has sites situated around a circle of blooming azaleas under tall pine trees.
Some of those azalea bushes are as big as trees, and Mark talked Denisa into standing in front of some of those blooms for a picture.
If you look closely in the picture below, you can see that we also have our own private lake just down the hill from our motor home.
We enjoyed calm winds that left our lake perfectly still to reflect those big puffy clouds.
You might notice there are no boats on the water, or fishermen on the shores of this lake. In fact, a single duck was the only other living thing at this lovely little lake.
We'll count her as the wildlife picture of the day.
This city park is actually closed, so that is the reason that we are enjoying this private lake. When we arrived, the camp host had to unlock the gate to let us in, and issue us a key to get in and out of the campground. While registered campers can come and go, the general public is locked out.
We are finding that more and more parks and public places are closed, and we just feel so fortunate that Pontotoc decided to keep the campground open. Many of our neighbors are full-time residents in this park, but they could have certainly closed it to transient campers like us. But we're so glad they didn't because we love this little campground among the very tall pine trees!
Besides this lovely campground, the main reason we stopped in Pontotoc was the nearby Tanglefoot Trail. This is a 43-mile-long rail-to-trail, and we couldn't wait to see it for ourselves. Biking is a great activity during this social-distancing time. It's easy to stay six feet away from others on a long bike trail.
We are fans of the rail-to-trail system that converts old railroad right-of-ways into exercise trails. This is certainly a nice one, because it features smooth pavement instead of the cinder surface we often see. Just like Denisa, railroads prefer grades of less than 2%. We're glad to say that we never felt like we were pedaling uphill. Going south out of town, it's a great flat trail through the trees.
Our destination today is the next whistle stop at Algoma, Mississippi. We rode our bikes to this little town, probably best known for the huge fish restaurant next to the bike trail. We watched as cars and golf carts pulled into the big parking lot, picking up to-go orders from the "Seafood Junction." We would find out that people drive for an hour to eat dinner here when the coronavirus isn't changing life across this country. We enjoyed a little spot of brightness, as someone put up this Easter pyramid in the middle of Algoma.
We really can't say enough good things about the Tanglefoot Trail, as we enjoyed our 12-mile ride today. It must be relatively new, because all the bridges, signs, and mile markers are in great shape. We even found this rain protection stopping place, complete with a set of bicycle tools and an air pump attached to that red pole in the foreground of the picture below. We can think of more than one time we could have used both rain protection and tools on a long ride!
Our wildlife picture of the day is of a groundhog that we saw on a cliff beside the trail. He had a mouthful of greens, watching a couple of bikers on the trail.
He must be used to seeing bicycles on the Tanglefoot Trail, because he didn't seem to be in any hurry to duck into his hole.
We liked that ride so much, that we decided to try the north section of the Tanglefoot Trail out of Pontotoc the next day. It started in the trees like yesterday's trail. But then we started seeing fields of yellow.
It was nice to have completely different views from the tree-lanes of yesterday's bike ride. Soon we found ourselves with open fields of yellow on both side of the trail. Zooming past similar fields in the car yesterday, we assumed we were seeing canola fields.
But at bike speed, we see that those are flowers instead of canola blooms. A google search tells us these are buttercups, a noxious weed?!? We're not sure why we are seeing fields full of buttercups.
Another popular roadside plant is clover. Most of the year it is pretty inconspicuous. But for a while in the spring it puts on these royal crimson crowns that are lovely.
We really did enjoy our campground, and the nice biking opportunities of Pontotoc, Mississipppi. It would have been a perfect place to stay isolated during this crazy pandemic. We could have put the kayak onto our own private lake, and biked all 43 miles of the Tanglefoot Trail. But we have a plan and a new destination in mind, so we only stayed for two nights. On our last evening we got a nice sunset, reflected in the glass-like water of the lake. It was a nice good-bye, and we hope to be back some day!
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