Nashville Farmers Market a Motorcycle Ride

This is our Sunday go-to ride during the summer.  Highway 12 from Clarksville to the Nashville Farmers Market.  It’s about 50 miles, and it’s perfect for a morning ride.  It's one of those southern
summer days hot, humid; on a motorcycle, you feel it, and it feels good.  

From Clarksville, it's map of the earth to Ashland City, a Mayberry type of town.  From Clarksville, it’s a two-lane twisting affair starting the drop into the Nashville basin.  After Ashland City, it opens up to a 4 lane ride along the river with large meandering high-speed turns.  It has great views of the rivers and hollers that feed into it. 

Once in the city, Highway 12 ends with a right turn on US Highway 41A.  After cresting the next hill, the Nashville skyline smacks you in the face with one of those views of the city.  From here, it’s a short ride through the heat Island that is Nashville. In and out of the clouds make for a great ride. 

The farmers market is in Centennial Park that includes the capital building.  The area is called German Town and, like a lot of Nashville, is a hotbed of development.  

Once here, we walk through the vegetable stands and eat lunch in the Air-Conditioned Food Court.  This court has it all, BBQ, Jamaican, Indian, Cajun, we settle on Greek.  You need to go there hungry and don’t expect to see McDonald's. 

It’s a fun experience even with the tourist here.  While in line paying for our purple cauliflower, we met a couple from Arvada, Colorado.  They were leaving here and flying home.  They said a lot of nice things about the city.  

After lunch, we rode home; there seemed to be much less traffic, always a plus on a Motorcycle.

Harvest Host : The Bent Limb Farm

We are members of Harvest Host.  A unique RV membership program where you have access to over 1800 different businesses allows you to stay on their property for a nominal purchase of their product.  Locations include establishments such as farms, wineries, breweries, museums, restaurants, attractions, and more.  

Today we are staying at the Bent Limb Farm.  Tucked into the western hills of Pennsylvania, it is mainly an alpaca fiber farm, but they have so much more.  They also raise free-range hogs, chickens, ducks, and rabbits.  They have an on-site shop that sells all of the above.  Best of all, they are some of the friendliest people you'll ever meet.

Once here, you have a free run of the farm.  We parked our RV right in between a hogpen and a field that contained the alpacas.  Harvest Host is such a great program.  You meet a lot of good people and lots of new experiences.

Lake Chitoc State Park: E-Biking Mississippi River Levee's

We are headed out on our deep south tour. One thing I have always want to do is ride bikes on the Mississippi River Levees. Doing this with our new Ebikes is going to make it a lot more exciting. Most of the Mississippi has a levee system that keeps the low land next to the river from flooding every year. We stop at Lake Chitoc State Park, in Arkansas which sits on the largest Oxbow lake in North America.

Riding these levees is fun and flat. I definitely have to get my bike behind back; it seems it's been a while since I been in a bicycle saddle for this long. We are on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi. Before flood control; the construction of the levees and drainage canals, the delta farmland would flood every year. Mostly becoming part of the river.

It was a short ride outside the State Park to get to the Levee. The levee road goes for miles with beautiful views of the river and the low land farms. We ride 20 miles south one day and then 20 miles north the next. The levee cuts through farmlands, forests, and river swamps. It has its own biodiversity of plants and animals, it is a very unique experience.

The river is alive, changing the landscape daily. Lake Village, the current county seat, was eventually moved there in 1857. The county seat was moved several times because the river claimed the other towns. If you look at the state line between Mississippi and Arkansas, you can see how much the river has changed even since the states were created. Oxbow lakes are formed when a large river, in this case, the Mississippi, changes course. They do this by cutting through a river bend and rejoining the river farther downstream. The man-made levee system now keeps this from happening.

The state park we are in has an old steamboat boiler. Navigation on the river took a lot of skill, as Mark Twain noted in “Life on the Mississippi.” Riverboat Captains trained for years, learning every part of the river before they were allowed to captain their own boats. When the river was wild and untamed.

We ended up staying here three nights, enjoying the evening sunset on Lake Chitoc. We'll have to make it back here. There is lots more levee to ride, but now it's off to Vicksburg and Natchez with a step back into time.