Today’s Run:  Rest Day

“Nothing on the River!” is something that you will frequently hear if you drive with us often.  Every now and then you will hear, “Something on the River!”  And that “something” would be a barge (or two, or three).

We cross over the Tombigbee River on every trip we make into Columbus. On the majority of the trips into town, we do not see any barge traffic but every now and then we get a little spurt of traffic.  It is usually coal or scrap metal.

We have a scrap metal refinery place here in town. They bring in quite a bit of scrap for that place.  We frequently see the semi’s hauling the scrap metal down the road to the refinery.  First, though, the trucks have been to the river where they have been loaded right from the barges.

Today, we were on a lovely afternoon drive, down by the river, and went past the place where they load the trucks.  It was our lucky day!  They were loading trucks while we were driving by!

“Stop the car!”.

I frantically dug in my purse (I knew my phone was in there somewhere. My phone is also my camera  🙂 and pulled out my phone and passed it to my husband.  He dutifully snapped a pic and here it is…You cannot see the barge as it is low in the water but the blue thing is a huge crane and underneath the crane, in the center of the pic, by the light pole, is the red cab of the semi.  Above the semi is a very large “funnel”.  What they do is just scoop up a bunch of scrap metal and literally drop it into the funnel, which directs the scrap into the truck bed.  It is very noisy and fascinating to watch.  It takes three scoops to fill one truck bed (I counted).  The name of the tug boat was the Barbara Lynn.