A Good Start

Mellow Yellow Road Trip, Day 1: Peachtree City, GA to Shiloh, IL

This sight dominated our day today as we traversed Tennessee with all its beautiful green mountains. We were lucky to have clear to partly cloudy weather all day and never saw a drop of rain. That will probably change tomorrow as we cross Missouri and most of Nebraska. Isolated snow showers in Yellowstone tonight and into next week.

Nine hours and 580 miles today got us to Shiloh, IL, a suburb of St. Louis. As we crossed Kentucky, we learned that all of their interstate rest areas have wifi service. We were very impressed. We can't even get paper towels in the restrooms at Georgia rest areas!

At the KY welcome center, we saw some huge sycamore leaves:

Then we used our PDA to check out some info on sycamores. We learned that sycamores can live to 500 years or more. After 200 or 300 years, they become hollow. As far back as colonial days, people competed to set records for how many people would fit into a hollow sycamore. One record holder fit 15 men on horseback or 40 on foot. Also colonists sometimes used hollow sycamores for shelter. An Ohio sycamore has been recorded as 15 feet in diameter, 48 feet in circumference.