Happy dogs

Hello, everyone. As was said a few weeks ago, it's been really busy at the home place and making new posts has slipped a bit.

Just for the fun of it, a picture from our recent Thanksgiving trip to visit family:

Happy puppies on their first family road trip.

While visiting we saw something that never appears at home in deep south Texas:

The ground under the tree was completely covered in the beautiful yellow leaves. (Leaves almost never color where we live.) As pretty as they were, though, we mostly noticed that going a few hundred miles northeast at this time of year meant going into a much colder area. Brrr!

Mud Island

Hello, everyone.

On our recent drive, we visited Mud Island, a peninsula in the Mississippi River at Memphis, Tennessee.

The "island" is snugged up to the main riverbank with a little connecting land bridge into downtown Memphis.

There is a pretty little park across from some of the many condos. If you drive past the condos and the houses, the road eventually turns and a short time later you find yourself in downtown Memphis. 

They have a purple martin house, with martins. The black-looking ones are the males and
the black and gray ones are the females. They eat mosquitoes and other insects.

A view of the bridge over the river from the park

There is a water entertainment area--it's described as educational, and the displays are informative.
But almost everyone there was there to splash in the miniature Mississippi.

There are wall displays illustrating river systems. This appears to be the drainage of the Missouri River. Children climbed on the river charts, too, and the system was set up to feed water into the channel at the base of the charts.

Cities are represented. The northernmost city included was Cape Girardeau, I think. The display is 5 blocks long, has riverbanks that match the contours of the shore and levees, and covers the southernmost 1,000 miles of the river's course. The illustrated town mark is for New Madrid (no, it doesn't sound like Madrid in Spain!) which was the approximate epicenter of the largest earthquake ever recorded in North America, in 1811.

The contours of cut-off bends are included as well.

There is also a museum there, and a concession, and lovely flowerbeds with sprinklers. The parking for this part of Mud Island is $6 for the day...and don't take your car out during the day, they don't do re-admit tickets for the parking lot. But you get a lot of splashing for your money.

All in all, it was a lovely morning reading the plaques about Mississippi River history and watching the children play in the water.

I'm ba-a-ack!

Hello, everyone.

As it says in the title, I'm back again.

I discovered a lovely walking trail in Memphis, Tennessee. (For any non-US readers, Tennessee is a state in the US. Famous cities in Tennessee are Nashville and Memphis.) It is very popular, both with pedestrians (walking and running) and bicycle riders. It goes under freeway lanes and past pretty subdivisions full of well-loved homes.

Entrance point into the greenway. 

Trumpet vine flowers in a tree on the greenway.

St. Louis Catholic Church in Memphis, TN. Baldachin is beautiful!