Yo! Westward Ho to the Alamo: Day 1 (Indian Mounds, Rattlesnakes, and Family Dinner)

We left Atlanta this morning all covered in snow. Both Atlanta and we were covered in snow as Livy felt the need to dive into it face first right before we got into the car. But, as Lorelai Gilmore says, "It was the snow; . . . it's like catnip."

So, after a fairly long car ride, which included the end of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and a reading of "Rapunzel" from my new Grimm's Fairy Tales (my Christmas present!), we arrived at the Moundville Indian Mounds. These mounds were built by the same bunch of Indians (the Mississippians) that built Etowah Indian Mounds just north of Atlanta and the Cahokia Mounds near St. Louis that Livy and I visited last year.

We really enjoyed this site, partly because it had so many mounds. They weren't that large, but there were 20! And they were less regulated than the Etowah ones, so we could climb on them as much as we wanted. We wandered all through the large, open grounds, stretching out travel legs, and we ran up and down mounds. The largest had a model of the chief's house on it, and there was a river overlook and some diorama kind of views of life in the Mississippian culture.

The museum was nothing super special; it was new and flashy, but a little too text focused. For museums, I like pictures and artifacts and more bulleted kind of text. We did really enjoy learning that when the Mississippians died, they believed that they would walk along the Milky Way (called the Path of Souls), make their way past winged snakes and ginormous birds of prey, and then reach heaven. Their chiefs got to turn into these winged snakes (which looked a lot like dragons on the pottery) or into underwater panthers. How cool is that? I wanna die and go become an underwater panther.

Also, they also buried the dead sometimes in shallow graves in the floor of their houses. Gross.

Over all, I like Etowah better, mostly because of the fish trap in the river. I am really unreasonably obsessed with fish traps. I have see two, and they were both remarkably cool. Basically, the Indians made these big Vs in the river with rocks so that the fish would get washed right through a small opening into their nets. Sneaky!

The Etowah mounds are larger, but fewer. I can't really remember the Cahokia mounds very clearly because Livy and I were 7 days into our whirlwind trip and very tired. I remember the Cahokia museum being best.

Oh! One more super cool thing about the ramble around and over the mounds: Behind one mound, near a lake formed when the dirt for the mound was carried out, we found a snake! We think it was a rattlesnake, but it was dead. We didn't get close enough to be absolutely sure that it was a rattlesnake or that it was dead, but we got a picture of it that I will post tomorrow night when I have an internet connection and an SD port on the same computer.

After we left the mounds, we drove the nearly two hours to get to Meridian, my home town. We had dinner with my mom and Mimi at Mimi's apartment (leftover Christmas ham and some boiled shrimp!) and then came back to my mom's to spend the night. We leave in the morning, headed west with the sun.