VILLAGE CREEK STATE PARK

Sometimes it seems that we are just blatting along an Interstate motorway going from one RV park to another. Each RV park being much the same with rows of Rvs jammed in like sardines. But where possible we like to use State Park and National Park campgrounds as they usually offer more space and sometimes, no most times, better surroundings.

With this in mind we decided to forgo the commercial campgrounds with their WIFI and laundries for the rustic simplicity of a state park and made our way up a twisting backroad to VILLAGE CREEK STATE PARK. As soon as we pulled in it was clear we had a winner and within minutes I was adding another entry in my bird spotters notebook as I spotted a sharp shinned hawk working a thermal. The campground was a delight
with well spread out shady plots with full hook-ups all for a very reasonable price. In the couple of days we were there we must have seen at least 50 different birds ok some were unidentifiable [by me] LBJs. But brightly colored tanagers, cardinals and some kind of predominately blue bird which might have been a female prothonotary warbler flitted around and we heard a wild turkey gobbling away one morning. Deer came out to graze on the open spaces and frogs were everywhere there was water nearby.

We also new about the hikes available before we came but one attracted us in particular.
The park holds the most unspoilt section of an old military trail which was built in the early 1800s to supply the forts in Little Rock and Fort Smith and was used a little later by the Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes as they were forcibly moved West along what became known as the Trail of Tears.

The roadway has been cut by footsteps, hooves and wagon wheels to a deep lane running through the trees. The parties of travelers would often stop here for a few days as the game was plentiful and the land a little dryer than the boggy miles from Memphis. As we stumped along carrying a water bottle and a camera only intent on making a couple of miles before retiring to our air conditioned RV with hot and cold running everything we did reflect on those who were making a journey of several hundred miles carrying all they owned and having to hunt or gather their food as they went. It is little wonder that the old, the very young, the halt and the lame did not make it to the New Lands that the Great White Father had promised them in Oklahoma.


It would have been easy to gather a meal from the mushrooms

but I might have skipped these two.












The deer might have been a little more gun shy than this pair.



We are heading toward the home of rock and roll and we will visit Gracelands for a lesson in tastefull décor as well.

Well when we got to Memphis and found our campground, we found it was underwater. Yes all that rain has flooded the mighty Mississippi. So here we are, slumming it at the Elvis Presley Blvd RV park, running on some very dodgy WiFi.