26 Oct Days 41,42 &43 Green Turtle Bay

Oct 24th. Started early with a Navagation meeting with The Loons, Knot Diggin and ourselves.  The destination was decided to head to Green Turtle Bay for a few days of R&R.  Green Turtle Bay is a looper favourite,  Catherine called it a velcro stop because people get there and tend to stick around for a while.

The discussion was how to get there.  There are two possible routes, the shortest one is up the Tennessee River and through the Kentucky lock, but it is rumoured to have horrendous delays due to busy commercial traffic.  The second route is a little longer up the Cumberland River and through the Barkley lock, which doesn’t have as much barge traffic.  Unfortunately, the lock is closed during the day from 6AM to 6PM.   We could hang out in Paducah and time our arrival for 6PM, but if there were any commercial traffic, there waiting, we would not make the Marina before dark.

We opted to take a chance on getting through the Kentucky lock, leaving early and getting there to get in the queue and hopefully the wait would not be too long.

Paducah is the home to some big repair facilities for the Tow boats.

 It was interesting to see the huge tows lifted out of the water on the floating dry-docks.

We arrived at the Kentucky Lock just before 11AM and were informed anywhere from a 3 – 5 hour wait.
We dropped the anchor just under the I24 bridge to wait our turn.

At least it was sunny and warm so while we were waiting Janet was sunning and reading on the flybridge and I took a dinghy tour of the lock and dam.  The Army Corp of Engineers is currently working on twinning the lock and I got to see them moving a huge section of wall into place.

The lock and dam looked a lot bigger up close.

I got back to the boat and took a 30 minute ride on my bike on the trainer in the sun on the flybridge.  Wendy, from My Everything, took some pictures of me but you don’t want to see that…
Then, quite surprisingly, the Lock-master called and told us all to get ready to head into the lock.  We entered the lock at 3PM.

And made it to Green Turtle Bay by 4PM.  Docktails and early to bed..
On Friday the 25th we went with the gang to the town of Grand Rivers and visited Patti’s 1880’s Settlement, a tourist trap with a lot of Knick-knack stores, not much to interest any of us. 

After a nice lunch in town, we took the Marina Courtesy car to see the Elk and Bison Prairie in the Land Between the Lakes National Park.

We did see some Elk.

And some Wild Turkeys

But the Bison did a very good job of hiding from us.  When we got back to the resort another Looper told us they only saw Bison and no Elk.  I blamed her for scaring them all away.
Saturday the weather changed and a line of thunder storms went through.  Janet and Marilyn were out walking and got soaked.  I got wet too, however, I was in the indoor pool and sauna.
That night we went up to the Halloween party at the Thirsty Turtle bar and had a few drinks, but we were under dressed without costumes and ended up back on the Two Loons boat for drinks and cruising stories.
It was a fun relaxing weekend in a nice facility and would recommend to anyone doing the Loop, but 3 days in one place seems to be our limit lately so we will move on tomorrow.