FAMILY TIME IN MEMPHIS AND SACRAMENTO

After a one-day weather delay in Oxford, we hit the road Monday morning.  Listening to the radio before departure, we ditched our previously planned route along back roads – the first small town we would pass through had tornado damage, and the list of flooded roads was too extensive for us to research.  We’d seen the flooding on I-40 between Memphis and Nashville on TV, but I-55 seemed to be open and dry.  We changed our plans, picked up I-55, and had a happily uneventful drive up to Memphis.

On previous visits here (Odel’s birthplace), we’ve stayed across the Mississippi in West Memphis, Arkansas, in one of our favorite RV parks, Tom Sawyer’s Mississippi River RV Park.  It fronts on the Mississippi and we’ve spent many peaceful hours watching the big barges and cruise ships pass by in front of us.  It’s a beautiful, peaceful place with friendly owners. The downsides?  The neighborhood is far from appealing, the walking is limited, and it is a 45 minute drive to visit Odel’s family on the other side of Memphis.  Also, very fresh in our minds since the big storms of the weekend: there is no safe tornado shelter there, or nearby. 

This visit, we decided to try the Agricenter International, a huge fairgrounds-type complex on the east side of Memphis (click here to read our review).  The Memphis NOAA radar site is located here, with a huge, tornado-safe shelter a short distance from our campsite. 

While the sites are nothing to rave about (fairgrounds style parking), the area is great: miles of walking/biking trails right out of the campground and in an adjacent county park, with convenient shopping and restaurants very nearby.  Best of all, it is a 10 minute drive to visit Odel’s family. 

When the choice is “mediocre campground, convenient area” vs.. “wonderful campground, inconvenient/questionable area”, we’ll usually put up with the mediocre campground.  In this case, we got lucky with our campsite – we’re in a less-congested part of the 200+ site campground, with open space (no RV sites) on the passenger side.  We were so pleased with our site, the friendly host, and the convenience of the location, we upped our reservation from 10 days to 2 weeks.

As soon as we were set up, we went to the on-site Farmer’s Market, open May through October 6 days a week.  Hard to beat fresh produce available for purchase a short walk away!  Next, we were off for our customary walk, this time on another part of this HUGE complex.  Quick showers, and we headed over to Audrey’s (Odel’s niece) house for a family get-together before we all headed off to the Bonefish Grill for a celebratory dinner.

Today: chores (we picked up our mail and the Boomer mail yesterday) and errands.  We discovered that one of the trails we planned to walk is underwater; the Wolf River on the southern boundary of the Agricenter is flooded from the weekend’s storms. 

Tomorrow I catch an early flight out to Sacramento - while Odel visits with his family here in Memphis, I’ll visit my parents, sister and girlfriends in Sacramento for 5 days.  No blog posting from there – too busy having fun!  Back in a week…

WILD WEATHER IN THE MID-SOUTH – OXFORD, MISSISSIPPI

(All of today’s photos are from Oxford and Taylor, Mississippi.  Hover your cursor over each for a caption, or click a photo to enlarge it.) 

Yesterday I described the skies as “leaden”.  Since then, we have seen every permutation of skies other than “blue”.  As I write this, rain is POURING, POURING down, accompanied by the occasional boom of thunder as mighty storms roll over us, one after another.  The temperature outside is 72 degrees (the lowest it has been in 24 hours); the temperature inside is 78, (time to turn on the A/C again).  “Humid” doesn’t begin to describe it!

The night seemed endless.  I took the early weather watch, while Odel caught some ZZZZ’s between the alarms from the weather radio.  Around 11 pm, things were looking better in Oxford, so I went to bed, too – fully dressed except for shoes.  The weather radio awoke us three or four times between midnight and 5 am as huge, powerful, thunderstorms “with tornado potential” (and tornados, for all we know) skirted Oxford  five or ten miles to the north.   After each alert, we turned on the local news – which had been showing nothing but weather since Saturday evening – and watched as intense red and orange radar echoes slowly moved past us to the northeast. 

Odel took over around dawn, while I slept until 10 am, awakened by the weather radio another three or four times for “watches” – flood, severe thunderstorm and tornado.  Slowly but surely, the front is moving beyond Oxford, taking the most severe weather with it. 

We are so grateful we are here on campus!  All three of the campgrounds in the Oxford area – two state parks and a COE park – were mentioned by name last night as storms edged past us.  We’ve been in that situation before, in South Dakota.  It is a sinking feeling to hear your campground mentioned in the litany of towns in the path of a tornado.

On the lighter (and dryer) side:  three times during the day Saturday, the rain stopped long enough for us to exit the motorhome and have some fun.  We took a bagful of used books to Square Books – they were interested in half of them and I was able to pick up a new book (Cornbread Nation 5, The Best of Southern Food Writing) in exchange.  We had enough dry time to sit on a bench with a huge ice cream sandwich (comfort food), mingling with the locals.

During another break, we drove south eight miles to the tiny village (population 289) of Taylor, Mississippi, a bit reminiscent of Luckenbach, Texas.  Taylor Grocery Restaurant is famous in Oxford and across the south for their catfish, with wait times in excess of an hour during game weekends.  Too bad for us, the mid-afternoon weather window didn’t coincide with lunch or dinner time.

Most of the rest of the town’s buildings are occupied by artists – this little village is a magnet for the creative arts.  Half a mile south of the village, a small, new neighborhood is taking shape, Plein Air – described as an “old-fashioned, traditional neighborhood with a with a vibrant town square”… and “its own sewer system, buried utility lines, master planned and maintained landscape system, and an active home owners association. Plans call for the entire site to have wireless high-speed internet access. A community shuttle will offer transportation to and from the Ole Miss campus and downtown Oxford several times per day.”  Plein Air is less than half completed now (but does have its own fire department and one-room Montessori school), but was quite appealing and intriguing to me, and I was glad we had the opportunity to visit.  You just never know what interesting spots travels will reveal!

Hey – another break in the rain!  (Oops, gone.) Things are looking up here in soggy, battered, northern Mississippi, and we have escaped unscathed, not even a leak.  Tomorrow?  Memphis.

EYES ON THE SKIES IN OXFORD, MS

“Leaden” is the perfect word to describe the sky as I write this morning.  Our county and the surrounding counties are under a tornado watch (conditions suitable for the formation of a tornado).  The counties north of us, around Memphis (our next stop), are under a tornado warning (a tornado has been sighted on the ground or on radar). 

Until we began fulltiming, we did not know the definitions of “watch” and “warning”, particularly in relationship to “tornado”.  Now we feel like old hands.

We had planned to move from Trace State Park to Oxford, MS, for two nights, then on to Memphis, TN, arriving there on Sunday.  Beginning on Thursday, the forecast deteriorated… severe weather on the way for the entire area.  We felt confident that our site in Oxford, on the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) campus (click here to read our review), would be the safest place for us to wait out the weather.

Here we are, parked across from the baseball stadium on campus.  It is a good spot for bad weather.  We are on pavement - nice when steady, heavy rain is falling.  The parking lot slopes away from us – good drainage.  We are on a hill – no worries about the flash flood watches and warnings that have been issued for our county.

We have 50 amps of electricity – needed to run our A/C, because it is warm, humid, and close inside when you have to keep the windows closed.  We have cable TV (!) – great for keeping track of local weather.  We have strong Verizon service here – we can watch NOAA radar on the internet in real time.  And of course, we have plenty of food on hand.  :) 

I took the above photo yesterday afternoon after we arrived, the pavement still dry and the sky a light gray.  After we arrived, we had two things on the agenda before the rain began: visit the Oxford Square, and figure out where we should go in the event of a tornado.  We accomplished both things.

The historic Oxford Courthouse in the center of Oxford Square.  This courthouse was built immediately following the Civil War, after the original was burned to the ground.	These buildings line one side of Oxford Square (the courthouse is to the left of this photo).  All are over 100 years old, rebuilt after the burning of Oxford during the Civil War.

The Oxford Square is a mile from here, and we set off on foot.  As soon as we arrived, we realized it was lunchtime, so we headed straight back to the Ajax Diner for another delicious meal.  Afterwards, I explored the square and its shops while Odel walked back to the campus.  We both had “tornado shelter” news to share when we reunited.

My source, an Ole Miss student staffing the downtown visitor center, suggested going to the campus hotel to shelter in the lobby.  Odel’s source, a campus policeman, told Odel how to find the on-campus shelters.  By the time I returned, Odel had already visited the small, solid concrete bunkers – and ruled them out for his claustrophobic wife! 

So we set off to research the on-campus hotel.  Walking through the campus was so pleasant – beautiful green trees and lawns, with lovely buildings, both historic and new.  In the hotel’s lobby, a young woman at a desk greeted us, thinking that we might be there as part of the 50-year class reunion – although Odel would not have been allowed to register at Ole Miss 50 years ago.

When we explained why we were visiting, a long and friendly conversation ensued.  She is from Yazoo City, the Mississippi town south of here that was hit by a major tornado a week ago when we were in Huntsville, Alabama.  Fortunately, her family, family home, and family business were safe and undamaged, but her hometown is facing serious consequences.  “Yes,” she encouraged us, “absolutely, come here to the hotel.”  They shelter guests in the basement and she said there was plenty of room for everyone.

Good!  Plans in place, we set off to walk the most historic part of the campus, the Circle and the buildings surrounding it.  The Lyceum, shown here, opened in 1848 for the first class of Ole Miss students.  During the Civil War, it served as a hospital for both Union and Confederate soldiers.  In 1962, Ole Miss was integrated when James Meredith registered at the Lyceum after a night-long riot that left two people dead and dozens injured.  We examined the bullet damage still visible on a few of the columns. 

Several times during our walk through campus, Odel and I recalled southern segregation and the struggle for civil rights.  Odel grew up in segregated Memphis.  He was a couple of years younger than 14-year old Emmet Till, when Till was beaten and murdered in Mississippi in 1955, within a couple hundred miles of Memphis.  He was one of only 13 black students enrolled at Memphis State when he began classes in 1961.  Certainly, in 1962, Odel and I could not have walked through the Ole Miss campus together safely.

Now, 48 years after Ole Miss was forcibly segregated, we’re parked on campus with our biggest worries caused by the weather.  Definitely an improvement!