Walkin' to the South out of Roanoke...

I caught a truck out of Philly, had a nice long toke. He's headed west from the Cumberland Gap to Johnson City, Tennessee....

This part in Wagon Wheel basically describes our day today. After hanging out and wandering around Hollins University last night, we drove from Roanoke, VA down to Cleveland, TN to stay with my paddling friend Allie to go boating around TN and northern Alabama. Noah and Dave had a good first experience at an all women's school and had to be escorted everywhere. We saw some cool weeping willows, thought twice about running their flooded raging class minus-II creek on campus with our play boats and then went to sleep. We got up late today (catching up on sleep), hopped in the car for a good number of hours and arrived safe and sound. We made a couple important stops along the way-like the one when we stopped to buy fireworks at a giant fireworks store. We stuck with the ones that go really high and have pretty colors and avoided the large boxed ones which looked like they would be a little too much bang for their buck...literally. We also saw Cracker Barrels (the restaurant and so much more) everywhere and think we have to stop at a Bo'jangles-Dave really wants Bo'jangles. Tennessee rest stops have now upped even Virginia's finest. The highlight of the day was stopping at Best Buy in Roanoke to make a necessary purchase of walkie-talkies-one for each car. This enables us to heckle each other from either car at any point with many comments like "This is mother goose to flying squirrel, did you see that cow? Over." "10-4-yes we did, did you see that giant cross? Over." "Jane, did you see those rocks? Over." "No, I was doing a cross-word. Over."

We're planning the beginning part of our week and are heading down to Little River Canyon, northern Alabama tomorrow to paddle for the day. We may end up camping there tomorrow night so we'll post mid-week if we do decide to camp.

Although some river levels are dropping, we are attempting to run only free-flowing rivers. There has been much discussion about blowing up dams. Let them be free!!!