After taking full advantage of the noon checkout time from the Inn on Bourbon, we headed down to the lobby. We left most of our bags with the bellman since our car was quite a few blocks away. When we arrived there, two days before, we were told the truck was too tall for their parking facilities due to the cargo carrier on top. So, after much frustration, we had parked it down near the French Market and kept our fingers crossed that overnight parking was allowed since the signs made no indication either way. By the time we had lugged our bags all the way back to the hotel, I vowed that was not going to happen again. Fortunately, when we arrived at the parking lot the truck was, in fact, still there. And, as an added bonus, it actually cost us $10 less to park in that lot then it would have to park in the hotel lot. Niiiiice. We drove back to the hotel, picked up our bags, and we were on the road again.
Jimmy was feeling a little under the weather so he fell asleep pretty quickly as we took a very long bridge, over Lake Pontchartrain and other wetlands, out of town. It wasn’t a suspension bridge but, for some reason, the pavement was extremely bouncy and it wasn’t helping his poor little tummy to feel any better. 
The drive to Memphis was only going to take us a little less than six hours and it was only going to take us through Mississippi. The landscape was very plain. For the most part the highways were surrounded by forest with the occasional farm thrown in for good measure. We stopped along the way to get some food at Cracker Barrel. Yum!
Eventually we arrived in Tennessee and navigated our way to Meeman-Shelby State Park, which is about 15 miles North of Memphis. We stopped to pick up some firewood and other necessities, at a gas station just outside the park. When we checked in, the woman let us know that even though we had a reserved spot we could take any of the others that weren’t reserved for someone else if we decided we liked it better. So, we took a drive through the campsites and decided that ours was just fine. And, we discovered something great – each site had it’s own power source. YAY! Internet connectivity had not been our only computer issue during the course of the trip. My laptop’s battery is not able to hold a charge, without being plugged in, for any longer than an hour or two. So, even when we had a good connection, if we weren’t near a power source it didn’t do us much good for very long.
We started to get our campsite set up and realized pretty quickly that the bug situation in Tennessee is out of control. We both had to use the bug spray within minutes of getting out of the car. Once we got ourselves situated, Jimmy started to build a fire to cook dinner and I set up shop at the power source, with the laptop, to get some writing done. By the time I had finished writing one blog, the fire was ready for the hot dogs so I shut down shop. I had been swiping bugs from the screen, my eyes, my face, my neck, my arms, and my legs the entire time anyway so it was getting to be a little irritating. Jimmy wasn’t having any better luck near the fire so we doused ourselves in bug spray again and started cooking dinner. It didn’t take long for us to abandon the outdoors completely. We set up the chairs and table inside the tent so we could play some cards. And then, with a plan to explore Memphis the next afternoon, we finally called it a night.
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