Great ride today. 90 miles and a triple...three states....Arkansas, Tennessee and Mississippi. The day started with an awesome sunrise and ended with me getting drenched walking to dinner. Hot and humid with scattered rain throughout the day...nothing heavy until this evening. Managed to get across the Mississippi River on a narrow 2 lane bridge without shoulders and then navigated my way through Memphis without a map and me not being able to figure out my cell phone map....a whole story in of itself!!
One of the highlights was stopping at a McDonalds for breakfast in Marked Tree Arkansas. The city got its name from a tree located on the bank of the St. Francis River until 1890 that had been blazed (cutting the bark away on a tree to leave a scar) to mark a section of the river where Native Americans could walk about 120 yards across land to reach the Little River and avoid paddling 12 mi upstream. Marked Tree has frequently been noted on lists of unusual place names.
The Crane pictured above is one of 8 at the Memphis Intermodal Facility, a state of the art BNSF hub to transfer containers between trains and trucks. Each crane can load containers on and off 8 trains at any given time. It can handle up to 4,000 containers and is the largest facility of its kind in the U.S. That's 4,000 truckloads of goods. It takes 27 minutes for a truck to deliver and pick-up a container....everything is computerized and it uses GPS technology to track the containers. Memphis is one of the largest distribution centers in the country.