We stayed in Paris for only one night. Paris Landing State Park was huge and really nice. They had a shuttle to take us to the restaurant that over-looked the TN River. Then we moved on to Clifton Marina in above all places — Clifton, TN. Kentucky Lake , which is 265 miles long and is essentially the Tennessee River, is a fisherman’s paradise due to all of the underwater structure. It reminded us of Charlotte Harbor; a lot of water but not all navigable. One thing we noticed is the abundance of spiders since we have to stay at marinas (I may have mentioned our generator doesn’t work). Thos spiders are everywhere on the docks and at night on the outside of the boat. Fortunately none are inside. However we had another intruder in our boat. See accompanying photo.
This is a pygmy rattle snake. They are more poisonous than a regular rattle snake. It was on the floor in the master berth. When we came back from dinner, Mocha was ‘hunting’. She was sniffing very intently at the stairs leading to our berth, an area she isn’t allowed to go into. I picked her up and set her down on the floor at the base of our bed. She was going crazy sniffing all over the sliding door to the room. When I moved the door a bit, she attacked the rattler that was curled up between the wall and the sliding door. Back home in FL, she hunted and killed two other pygmy rattlers but I stopped her after she bit it a few times because I figured the snake might not like that and bite back. After taking this picture, I put my shoe (I didn’t have it on) next to the snake and it immediately struck it and latched on to it with it’s fangs so I just carried it outside and tried to flip it into the water but it took me three tries to get that bugger off my shoe. I figure Mocha may have saved one of us. [the snake was on Diane’s side of the bed] so we have her a nice treat.
Engineer with a sense of humor? Railroad that ran our of money? Who knows but there were no signs of any other part of a bridge.
We were motoring down-stream as you can see by the picture. This whatever it was appeared in the middle of the river. It appeared to be all metal. It was worthy of including in our memory book.