Monday, May 4, 2009
LBL Piney Campground, Dover, TN: Mar 23-24
We called ahead to make sure the south road in was suitable for an RV, and were told that yes, the road had finally been cleared. Cleared? Well, back in January there was a horrific ice storm lasting two days that covered everything within a 100-mile radius of Paducah, KY with at least an inch of ice, two inches near Paducah. Most trees lost all of their top branches, the less fortunate trees were toppled at the root or split down the middle. Roads were covered with branches or whole trees. All electricity was out for at least 5 days, some areas were inaccessible for over two weeks.
The campground itself was nicely situated at the southern end of Land Between the Lakes, the thin finger of land between Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley, which are formed by dams on the Tennessee & Cumberland Rivers. It was pretty muddy (it rained most of the time we were here) and fairly empty; we got a spot overlooking Kentucky Lake. We drove up to the Visitor Center at Golden Pond and bought tickets to two of the shows they have at the planetarium there. We also noticed an observatory, and asked the guy who was giving the shows about it. He turned out to be the director of the planetarium, and we had an enjoyable few minutes discussing astronomy with him. Trouble was, then every time he saw us he'd dash over with some new factoid about whatever. But we had a great time, nonetheless.We also decided to check out the little town of Cadiz on our way to a buffet lunch at nearby Lake Barkley State Park. We are always stumbling across painted animals, where locals are invited to decorate the animal & then they're all auctioned off for some worthy cause, and Cadiz had Painted Pigs. A few were sort of blah, but most were pretty cute. The buffet on the way home was very tasty, except we overate, as always. After the buffet we bought tickets for the Elk & Bison Prairie Drive. What an incredible waste of time & money! Time, because the tickets are little paper cards with a magnetic strip that you pass through a reader, which 99 times out of 100 would not read it. You spend more time trying to get into the place than the actual drive, which was EXTREMELY uninteresting. Maybe during the short period where there are lots of young elk & bison, it might be interesting, but we wouldn't do it again. We saw more bison & elk outside the area than inside it. The exhibits and planetarium shows at the VC, on the other hand, are all well worth it.
# posted by Doug and Willie @ 10:04 PM 
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