...Vicksburg, The Fortress City....

...after hooking everything up and beginning to relax, our electrical connection went kaputt...in other words, our rig was 95 inside and 98 outside and no air conditioning...we had to head out to...what else, a Walmart...but no luck on a part we needed...we did find the part at The Home Depot..."our electrician" spent a good hour cutting and rewiring the cord and today we are cool as cucumbers...it was scary because the plug part of the cord started melting...it was a good thing we were there...Vicksburg was a very interesting city...we've been there before, but just for overnites...this time we really had a chance to tour the city...we saw the old candy story where coke was first bottled and the old County Courthouse had the largest collection of Civil War relics I've ever seen in one spot...all local findings and donated by local people...we spent one whole day touring the battlefield...we rented an audio/visual gps "thing" to show and tell us everything we needed to know about all the spots in the battlefield...it was outstanding...I'd recommend it to anyone...I think we missed a lot by not doing that at Gettysburg...I guess we'll just have to go back...he he...it was interesting to find out the town of Vicksburg did not celebrate July 4th for 100 years because Pemberton had surrendered to Grant on July 4th....the cemetery had the largest number of Union Soldiers buried there...the story of the Ironclad Cairo was unbelievable...it had set on the bottom of the Mississippi River for almost 100 years and was able to be restored...there were so many artifacts that were found inside....very interesting...next stop is another FamCamp at Barksdale AFB in Louisiana....