The land of bourbon, horses, and tobacco

We are in Kentucky, at the Bailey's Point Corps of Engineers campground on Barren River Lake (map).

Yesterday we had a quiet morning at the Murfreesboro Wal-Mart. The generator, which had run for about three hours Monday night, came back on around 9am, perfect timing to crank up more air conditioners as the day warmed up. We did a little shopping and some projects around the house, and I called over to the post office around noon.

It took a bit of explaining (and two different clerks -- apparently, fewer and fewer employees at the USPS even know what General Delivery is), but I finally convinced someone that we were from out of town, and that our mail must be there, having been sent Priority Mail from Washington six full days ago. That person rummaged around for a while and finally found it. There's a good chance it had actually been sitting there since Monday, but the clerk Louise saw in person refused to look anyplace but on the General Delivery shelf.

By 1:00 we had picked up the mail and were on our way north. US231 took us directly out of town and north past the Cedars of Lebanon, and put us on US31E near Bethpage north of the town of Lebanon. 31E brought us over the state line and here to the lake. Today we will continue north on 31E through Glasgow. When we reach Horse Cave, east of Mammoth Caves National Park, we will rejoin a route we left two years ago, on our way south. We will likely be retracing a good part of that route, as the Markland Dam is one of the very few river crossings along that stretch of the Ohio, and we would otherwise need to go west to Madison or east to Cincinnati. (Oddly, Street Atlas still shows a handful of ferries along this stretch, but they all shut down years ago.)

The campground here is enormous, with five separate loops and about 100 sites. It's mostly empty, and we had our pick of nice lakefront sites with 50 amps and good satellite access. We walked the few feet to the shore and had a nice swim yesterday afternoon, and I would guess the water temperature to be in the high 80's right now. With the air temperature pushing 100, though, it felt refreshing. Speaking of which, we are heading towards the Indiana/Ohio state line, which my weather maps indicate has been a bit cooler than where we've been. We are moving slowly toward Goshen, where there will be an Escapade in a little under two weeks.

Between now and then, we need to survive Labor Day Weekend, when parks such as this one, now nearly empty, will be full to capacity. I am hoping it will be a bit cooler, because we will likely end up boondocking for the two heavy nights. Or we could get deployed, which would render the subject moot. There is a large disaster response right now in Grand Forks for the tornado that ripped through southwest of there. We were 20+ hours away when they decided to ramp up the response, so they initially deployed someone who could fly in sooner than we could get there. If either of the two tropical systems that are currently under investigation in the Atlantic (AL942007 and AL952007) turns into a numbered tropical depression, we will halt our progress toward Goshen and reposition.