The north side of Jackson is the newer and nicer side. That’s where we will be. It’s much more developed than I thought it would be, but kind of crammed into one little area. It looks kind of like Mansfield does with all the strip shopping centers and restaurants popping up. The mall is on the less desirable south side and is kind of the quality and size of the old Six Flags Mall. We’ll stay away from there on the weekends and at night if possible. There are 3 colleges there but we only drove by the private Christian college. It has lots of places to eat…Mostly steak and barbeque joints with very few Mexican.
There are lots of really nice houses. Way more than you would think. And then there are lots of really poor houses…Right next to the nice neighborhoods. We found 3 possible churches. One that I looked at before online and two we just happen to see driving around. They have about half of the shopping we have around the Parks Mall but still enough. Only a few of our favorite stores instead of a lot them. It takes 2 - 15 minutes to get pretty much everywhere you need. It took all of 5 minutes to get to Nathan’s work from the house….In another town. That’s unbelievable. The kids will either go to a nice, new school or an old, junky school. Supposedly, they are the better ones though.
Our neighborhood is plain-jane but pretty new and seems quiet and taken care of. I think they were all pretty basic one story houses. We have to adjust to losing 500 sq ft, but we’ll get rid of some stuff and it’ll be fine. No curbs or sidewalks in most of the neighborhoods. We’re on the tip of the cul-de-sac which will be nice for the kids to play. We can have our basketball goal up again if we want and there’s a little playground just down the street. All of the new construction houses are on the small side unless you have an acre or two and half a million to build a giant house. This agent told us that the live-in population was around 100,000 but the daytime population was about 400,000 because everyone filters in to work, shop, and eat. The hospital looked pretty nice from the outside…I don’t plan on seeing the inside. The people looked the same. There were good, bad, and ugly just like here. Very few Hispanics or Asians. Some of their accents made them sound pretty stupid, but they might think the same about us, too.
It takes about 8.5 hours to get there without stopping. There isn’t much too see the whole way, and the places we stopped were flat out disgusting. I don’t know why, but Arkansas smells. Memphis was scary and about an hour away from Jackson. We didn’t go to Nashville but I think it is 2 hours away.
Here are the photos of our house. The sun was shining through everywhere, but you get the idea.
http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v226/mccallum32/TENNESSEE/?albumview=slideshow
If you feel like learning more about the city you can check out their website: http://www.jacksontn.com/
Jackson does have a Double A baseball team for the Seattle Mariners. They have 13 different fireworks shows and the tickets are a whole lot cheaper than the Texas Rangers...I bet they will play a whole lot better, too!
