The Great River Road 2026
  
 

Day 11

June 5

  
     
     
   
  Today's a short two hundred mile ramble up the Trace and back to the Holler. Breakfast is easy as on the other side of the Trace is my gas stop that happens to have a great little deli inside.  
   
  The biscuits are fresh and they put heaping slices of bacon on one of my biscuits. They are might tasty to say the least.  
   
  In the strength of that meat I resume my run back up the Trace which I have pretty much to myself again.  
   
  I cross the Tennesssee-Tombigbee waterway, a 234-mile man-made canal and river system connecting the Tennessee River in northeastern Mississippi to the Black Warrior and Tombigbee rivers in Alabama. Completed in 1985 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, it provides a shorter, alternate route from the US midcontinent to the Gulf of Mexico.  
   
  The mimosas are really showing their colors this time of year.  
   
  Then I cross the Tennessee River and I have to wonder just how wide was it before they built all the dams on it.  
   
  I enjoy the shady canopies as I travel northward ...  
   
  and the twists and turns that become more plentiful the farther north I ride.  
   
  They have closed the north end of Trace at the highway 96 bridge to do some sort of work again. Because the bridge became a magnet for those who wanted to terminate their lives, the park service had lined the side of the bridge with chain link fencing. I suppose this will be some sort of revision to that.  
   
  But I have a nice shortcut that keeps me in the shade as I draw closer to my beloved Holler  
   
 

Back home, some 4,000 miles later it is good to be back. I enjoy riding and seeing the sights, but I also enjoy being back in my Holler because

"There Ain't No Place Like Home"