Tuesday, October 25, 2011

We left our anchorage at Paducah and headed to the Cumberland River.  When we reached the Cumberland we were delighted to see how beautiful it is. 







There were a few houses near the water at first, but then we saw only trees and farmland.

Pretty soon, though, we rounded a bend in the river and this rock quarry operation came into view.  We saw another, smaller operation a few more miles upriver.












 It was interesting to see, but we were glad to finally get past the noise and resume the peaceful, scenic landscape we'd been enjoying. 

There were several small creeks that joined the Cumberland along the way.

We reached the Barkley Lock 38 miles up the Cumberland from the Ohio and it was a pretty dramatic view coming in.  This boat in the lock is 64 feet long, and you can see how small it looks here. 

Every time the lock is operated, it uses 37.5 million gallons of water but, once the gates were closed, it only took 5 or 6 minutes for us to be lifted 57 feet.

Here's the view when we were almost ready to exit.

This was our first view of Lake Barkley, a man-made lake that is 134 miles long with over 1,000 miles of shoreline.

It only took about 10 minutes to get to Green Turtle Bay Marina where we would spend the next 2 nights.  GTB is a beautiful marina with 450 slips, gas dock, a couple of restaurants, laundry facilities, free loaner cars, golf carts to rent for trips into town, a complete service department, ships store, and wifi.

Amazingly, the daily dockage fee was the same as Hoppie's.

This is the cute gazebo right in front of Paradise where we met other "Loopers" for happy hour each evening.  Besides great conversations and stories, we got lots of good advice for our trip.







We're waiting for a generator pump to arrive and I'm looking forward to a couple of days of being able to get out of the boat and walk around.