We were able to sleep in today, we have another short day, only 43 miles and no locks.  The next lock we have to go thru, the Wilson lock, is being shut down on the 5^th so we are trying to get thru it before then.

Now that we are on the Tennessee River there will be lots of new and fun things to see.  One thing about the Tennessee river, is it is so wide and straight, we can use our auto pilot a lot while traveling east

Our old but trusty Auto Pilot

In cause you don’t know how the auto pilot works, you point your boat in a certain direction or degrees and then, in our case, you hit the “auto” button.  The auto pilot will keep you going in that direction for ever.  If the river turns or if a boat or land jumps in front of you, the auto pilot doesn’t care, it just keeps going.  So PAY ATTENTION!  And be sure to adjust your direction when the river changes course.  Plus if debris or another obstruction get in your way, you have to put the auto pilot on “standby” and drive the boat around whatever is in your way then re-position the boat again and hit the “auto” button again.  There is a “resume” button we could use which would put us back on the same course but our auto pilot is a little more temperamental.  Age does that to you ya know ;).  So, in the long run,  the auto pilot does help considerably, especially when we are driving on only one engine.

We saw a few more tows today

Tows

And yes I know that black spot is STILL on my camera.  I am going to have to get that fixed when we visit this summer :).

We also saw  this partial building in the middle of the river

Full View

One side

Steps even….someone’s house?

And the other

Gosh darn it!  It looks like I have a couple more spots on my camera lens!  Now I’ll definitely have to get this taken care of.  Can’t have shotty pictures on the Touch of Class blog.

Well back to sight-seeing.  The homes along here are crazy stupid big and beautiful

Wow! More like a castle and look at that sea wall

You can see how clean the water is

Clean water behind the boat

And the views!

View

view

view

View

We saw this bolder building

Boulder building at park

We wondered what the heck was in it

Looks like a bunch of junk

Just a bunch of junk and old trailers.  I just can’t imagine why they built that type of building here.  Pretty cool looking but just think of the man or machine power!

There was this really cool trail right along the river bank

Looks like beginning of trail

Part of trail along stone shore

I’d love to follow that trail, it looks so cool!

As we were just pulling into our destination for the night, Florence Marina,

Florence Marina

we were being followed in by

Jiggers! It’s the cops!

I thought, Oh No!  They are going to pull us over and board us, quick, hide the booze 🙂 . But really, a State Trooper boat?  Now I’ve seen everything.  All the cops have to have boats on the waterways.  I bet they fight over that job 🙂

After we tied up the boat we did some sight-seeing around the marina.  This marina is owned by the city so anybody and everybody comes over and fishes on the docks.  There is a nice park across the way and a couple of launching ramps.  We saw this boat at the gas dock.  See the addition he made to his swim platform?

Weird addition to swim platform

I guess he really wanted a boat with a cockpit :).

We had passed on going out at some of our previous stops because we wanted to eat at our new favorite Mexican restaurant, Rosies.  So after we paid for dockage we reserved the courtesy car so we could drive there.  We waited all day and finally we jumped in the car to go to dinner.  We drove to Rosies….there were no card in the log, we hoped it was because they weren’t open yet…boo hoo!  They aren’t’ open on Mondays!  Waaaaaa.  Good think they have a restaurant at the marina.  We ate there instead, was actually pretty good food but would have preferred a nice Mexican dinner :).

Then I was sitting on the boat when I saw this building go by on the river

Building floating by???

Big Honkin Building!

What the heck?  See the guy standing on the second floor?

Do they know they have a passenger?

I wonder where that is going.  That is a first for me, now I’ve seen everything.

After our lookie lu trek around the marina we have decided it is off to an early bed tonight in hopes we can get thru the Wilson lock without too much trouble tomorrow.