Thursday, July 5th 2012

“Load limits? We don’t need no stinkin’ load limits!”

As we were pulling out of The Colony Paula did have the audacity to check the Corolla’s official “recommended load” capacity. Let’s just say that we were probably already hovering near the limit with our snacks alone. The truth is that the roof-top “packright” carrier we bought worked beautifully. Fifteen cubic feet of storage carried all our camping gear plus a good deal of our other bric-a-brac. Sure, our miles-per-gallon were a little lower than normal, and I did have trouble beating that Camaro out of that one stop light, but all in all we cruised across Texas, Arkansas and into Tennessee with ease.

We arrived at Meeman-Shelby Forest State Park about 13 miles north of Memphis around 4:30 and set up camp. After some mate and snacks we headed out on a 3-mile hike through the dense forest of “oaks, American beech, hickory, and sweet gum” (I’m no naturalist and cannot name those trees on sight--got that from the park brochure). The Tennessee humidity proved to be sauna-like, and we returned to the camp site a little drenched.

One highlight of our hike was discovering this huge wasps nest.

The 100-foot trees around our camp meant darkness falls early, however, so we needed to cook up our dinner of veggie dogs and baked beans.