Red Bay Chronicles, Sunday, August 12

Since my last entry on Wednesday, the only news on the Castle is that the truck with the jacks on it finally did arrive Friday morning.  We’re optimistic that they will be able to work us in sometime in the next couple of days to have the new jack(s) installed.  We’ll both feel a lot better if we can be more stable while we wait for additional repairs.

Meanwhile, we’ve been keeping busy doing small projects and catching up with Dortha and Mark.  On Thursday, we went with them to Tupelo where we did some window shopping at Best Buy, and bought a few things at Sam’s Club.  We topped off the day with a good barbeque at The Rib Shack in Tupelo.

Friday evening we all went to dinner at Mr. J’s, the local pizza restaurant – the pizza is definitely some of the best we’ve had anywhere, and the salad was just as good.

Yesterday we put together a fish fry.  Jim got out his burner and dutch oven for the event, and we had a delicious dinner.  No pictures of the dinner, we were hungry by the time it was ready and ate it all too fast .

Today we took a drive about 60 miles to the Shiloh Civil War Battlefield at the National Military Park in Shiloh, Tennessee.  When we started planning this summer’s travels, we talked about visiting several Civil War sites.  Jim mentioned Shiloh,  and neither of us realized we’ve been so close to it every time we’ve come to Red Bay.  It was an extremely interesting and moving experience to visit this historic site.

Dortha, Jim and Mark check our some of the 600 cannon on the site:

Jim took this picture of a small diorama located in the visitor's center museum.  This scene depicts the part of the battle called The Hornet's Nest:

There were over 23,000 dead, injured or missing as a result of the battle at Shiloh.  This is a view in the National Cemetery located there:

Many, many of the graves have this designation:

The cemetery overlooks the Tennessee River:

This is one of the 200 monuments located in the 4200 acre National Military Park:

The original log Methodist Meeting Hall known as Shiloh where the battle was fought:

More of the cannon:

We went through the museum at the visitor's center, watched the film presentation, which was very well done, and very informative about the April 6 - 7, 1862 battle.  We walked around the cemetery, visited the book store for our National Park stamps, and then spent the rest of the time on the driving tour.

After all of that, we were hungry.  We stopped at a Mexican restaurant in Iuka, MS, on the way back to Camp Red Bay.

The campground cleared out Friday evening and yesterday,  here is Dorth and Mark's Phaeton across the street from us:

Their row was pretty empty yesterday, along with the row behind them.  We think there were easily over 30 empty sites.

Of course, it’s starting to fill up again this evening.  Looks like another busy week ahead at Camp Red Bay!