Today is Sunday, the seventh day of my trip. Its a good day. I spent the night at Ellen's, got all my clothes and Venus's dirty towels washed, took a real shower for the first time in a week and caught  up with an old friend.

This morning I realized I was on the northern end of the Natchez trace parkway. Its a splendid two lane road that runs for 300 plus miles from Nashville to Nachez Mississippi on the river. Its all a national park so its unfettered with any advertising. there were 5 letterboxes between Nashville and tupelo,Ms, my goal for the day. I found most of them but the most interesting was a box at the Key Underwood Coon dog Cemetery. it was started in 1937, only coon dogs can be buried there and it has a population of several hundred curs. Many tombstones are granite and there are two monuments depicting the dogs treeing a raccoon.
The drive to this cemetery went WAY into the woods of Northern Alabama... I thought I could hear banjo's or smell the sweet odor if corn mash. The weather was nice but I did my business and got the hell out of there quickly.

Tupelo, Mississippi, where Elvis was born, suffered a pretty bad tornado early in May this year. Id never been in a tornado zone before the mess was cleaned up, it was pretty stark, roofs blown off hotels, complete buildings destroyed and when I asked the waiter at a restaurant about it, he said the staff had to hide in the cooler and bathrooms til it was over. give me a little ground shaking anytime.