On to the Midwest

This trip is starting to feel like a reservoir tour.

There is certainly no shortage of reservoirs to choose from, for our nation spent much of the previous century on a veritable drunken spree of dam building.  During the first half of this vacation trip I visited Percy Priest, James, Mountain Island, Norman, and Fontana.

When I fled the rain in the mountains Monday I ended up camping at Rock Island State Park, located on a spit of land curiously nestled in between two reservoirs, Great Falls and Center Hill.  I first visited this area in the mid 1980s with a summer camp friend whose family owned a cabin on the Collins River, one of the rivers impounded to create Great Falls Reservoir.  I immediately found it to be an exceptionally picturesque place: with its rivers and steel-truss bridges and railroad line it reminded me of Hardy, Arkansas, where my family had taken summer trips when I was little.  The area was also a haven for lovers of water-sports of all kinds: during the visit I did some water-skiing with my friend's family--that's an obvious thing to do on a reservoir--but we also got to paddle some whitewater!

Great Falls Dam is one of the more interesting dam projects I've ever seen.  It was constructed right at the confluence of the Collins and Caney Fork Rivers, at the top of a series of waterfalls.  The pool elevation of the resulting reservoir allows water to be dropped through a pipe into a powerhouse at the bottom of the falls.  One sad result of the dam is that the falls are dewatered much of the time, but down below the powerhouse is a short stretch of whitewater that includes a couple of world-class playspots before it peters out into Center Hill Reservoir.  That's where my camp friend and I had some fun during that mid-80s visit.

This week I had nothing but my surf ski on the car, so I stuck to the flatwater up above the dam.  Tuesday morning I put in at a public access on the Collins River and paddled for 80 minutes, going past the dam and a mile or two up the Caney Fork before turning around and going back to where I'd put in.  While on the water I did a set of eight 12-stroke sprints at two-minute intervals.

With the important business of paddling out of the way it was time to make another step toward the Midwest.  I set my sights toward another reservoir, Lake Barkley in southwestern Kentucky.  Several hours later I was setting up camp at a place called Eureka Campground, as in "Eureka!  This place is actually nice!"  It's a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers campground, you see, and Corps campgrounds, while offering all the amenities one could want, like showers and flush-toilets and playgrounds and stuff, tend to be sterile industrial/institutional places.  The fact that Eureka is located next to Barkley Dam led me to expect lots of concrete poured over terrain that had been bulldozed into submission.

What I found instead was as nice a developed campground as I've ever seen.  My campsite was on a wooded hillside a short walk from the water's edge.  The place was certainly landscaped, but tastefully so, like a nice backyard in an established neighborhood or something like that.  It didn't hurt that the weather was gorgeous.  I consider the Land Between the Lakes area to be in the same part of the country as Memphis, more or less, but there was no hint of the sweltering weather we endured there for most of last month.  The sky was clear and the air was cool and crisp, almost like a beautiful day in October.  My camping gear was still damp from the soggy places I'd stayed the previous two nights and I was grateful for a chance to get it all dried out for good.

On Wednesday morning I paddled for 70 minutes out on Lake Barkley.  My intensity level ranged from easy to the hard side of medium, and I did a set of six 12-stroke sprints in the middle of the session.

By now my goal was to arrive up in Dubuque Friday, so I got out my map and looked for another reservoir along the route.  I decided on Carlyle Reservoir, located in south central Illinois just outside a town called (suitably enough) Carlyle.  Once there I found myself camping lakeside in another Corps of Engineers campground.  This one wasn't as nice as the one at Lake Barkley, but it wasn't bad.  Most important was that it had adequate shade.  The campground was quite a bit more crowded with RVs than the one at Barkley, but the people seemed nice and reasonably quiet.

I woke up yesterday morning and made myself some breakfast and then got in my boat for a 60-minute paddle.  I did four 12-stroke sprints while I was out there.

Once that was over I embarked on the longest stretch of driving for this North-Carolina-to-Iowa leg of the trip: about four and a half hours.  I made it to the Quad Cities region (Rock Island and Moline, Illinois, and Davenport and Bettendorf, Iowa) and decided to spring for a motel, whose wi-fi service is allowing me to deliver all this news to you.  My body is ready for a break from paddling and I plan to spend today making what looks like a scenic drive along the Mississippi River up to Dubuque.

When I began this trip the North-Carolina-to-Iowa leg looked to be the most arduous, but spreading it out over five days, combined with the still-lovely weather, has made it rather delightful.  Yesterday was the only time the driving began to feel like a chore; otherwise I've had the freedom to take my time, drive some secondary roads, take in the sights... all the things you ideally would like to do during a trip across our great nation.

Tomorrow I'll do a short paddle just to get my body loose.  My class, "K1 Unlimited," races on Sunday morning.  Chances are I won't be back online until Sunday night, when I check into a motel during the long trip home.