Day 11

We awoke to another beautiful morning with tons of different kinds of birds singing, and took our time enjoying the first deciduous forest we'd camped in since we left the east coast over 5 years ago. Mike made an awesome breakfast of cheeseburger-mac, then hard boiled some eggs for our drive that day. It was funny to find out how close to the lake we had actually camped the night before. We had literally stayed on the shore of Shores Lake without even knowing it. Anyway, it was getting later so we packed up the last of our stuff, collected some junk from the surrounding sites to throw away, and headed back to civilization. The drive out of the park was pretty interesting since we hadn't seen anything in the dark the night before. We got a good overview of the whole lake as we drove up one of the (smaller-sized) mountains and were shocked at how much we had underestimated its size. As we drove on we got a good look at the houses we had driven past on the way in... and the residents got a good look at us from their front porches. Those places were as ramshackle as they get and we even had a run in with what we deduced to be the Ozarkian's take on neighborhood patrol. There was a dude... in a white pick-up truck... stopped at an intersecting road. As we rolled by he watched us and sipped his beer. (!!!) As we got on down the road he pulled out after us (no surprise), tailgated us for a couple miles, then eased up and continued to follow us at a distance until we got out of the forest. I guess you can't blame him for being curious, we've been a strange sight the whole trip in our Budget truck cruising around in backwoods areas, but we kept an eye out and didn't plan to stop at all... for any reason. Back on the highway, it was 3-4 hours to the Mississippi River and Memphis which would mark another milestone for us. Even though we're excited to be getting close to home, we can't help but feel a little sad that this trip is almost over. Tonight we made it into Knoxville, TN and decided to treat ourselves to a room with a jacuzzi. Unfortunately we don't have too much time to use it because we crossed into the eastern standard time zone right before we got into town, but we're doing our best to enjoy it. Tomorrow we should be making it home before dark and we're really looking forward to seeing Mike's folks.