Tuesday, December 11, 2007 - Foscue Creek Park, Demopolis AL
< previous day | archives | next day >
US Coast Guard boat house, Demopolis Lock and Dam, Demopolis AL, December 13, 2007
Watching the water in the cove suddenly start flowing out - then reverse in a few minutes. It took me a while to realize what that water flow is about. The campground is a half mile or so upstream of a lock & dam and the lock was being filled from upstream, in this case lifting a barge & tug which appeared out of the fog a half hour or so later, headed up river from Mobile AL I presume.
Later today I went online to the Recreation.gov web site and reserved this great spot for another 5 nights, arriving Thursday, leaving Tuesday. It's interesting how this reservation system works. The local people are not connected to the online reservation system so there is a time delay before they get notification of online reservations. Thus one can reserve a site locally for only two nights and one can not reserve a site online (or by phone) for those two nights. That way there is no overlap. That left me with a one night gap in my reservation so I went out to the gate and filled in that gap. Now I'm good for this site through 3:00 pm Tuesday.
Night camp
Site 42 - Foscue Creek Campground, Demopolis AL
- This is a well maintained US Army Corps of Engineers campground with level paved sites, most with full hookups
- Many sites overlook the water of the inlets off Demopolis Lake on the Tombigbee River
- There is good biking on the park roads
- The campground is pretty full Thanksgiving week and is generally booked solid the weekend of the Demopolis Christmas on the River festival in early December.
- Poor Verizon cell phone service - access is via Extended Network, roaming
- No Verizon EVDO service - access is via the Extended Network and service varies is slow but reliable
- Only 3 miles to Wal-Mart and other services in Demopolis AL
- Find other references to Foscue Creek
- List the nights I've camped here
- Check the weather
- Reserve a site
- Get a map
Beware of Hypnotic Media
To live sanely in Los Angeles (or, I suppose, in any other large American city) you have to cultivate the art of staying awake. You must learn to resist (firmly but not tensely) the unceasing hypnotic suggestions of the radio, the billboards, the movies and the newspapers; those demon voices which are forever whispering in your ear what you should desire, what you should fear, what you should wear and eat and drink and enjoy, what you should think and do and be. They have planned a life for you — from the cradle to the grave and beyond — which it would be easy, fatally easy!, to accept. The least wandering of the attention, the least relaxation of your awareness, and already the eyelids begin to droop, the eyes grow vacant, the body starts to move in obedience to the hypnotist’s command. Wake up, wake up — before you sign that seven-year contract, buy that house you don’t really want, marry that girl you secretly despise. Don’t reach for the whiskey, that won’t help you. You’ve got to think, to discriminate, to exercise your own free will and judgment. And you must do this, I repeat, without tension, quite rationally and calmly. For if you give way to fury against the hypnotists, if you smash the radio and tear the newspapers to shreds, you will only rush to the other extreme and fossilize into defiant eccentricity.