Three days in Tennessee

(Roughly edited but wanted to post)

During April vacation we decided to pay a brief visit to our son Joe and his wife, Kelsi, leave Andrew there with them and then Mike and I would do some visiting in Tennessee.  We left very early on Monday to head to Lynchburg, Virginia and had a wonderfully uneventful trip down. The best part was the final hours spent on the Blue Ridge Pkwy. and even Andrew remarked he liked it so much he would like to retire there. In Virginia we spent the evening with Steve and his fiancé Amanda. Kelsi returned home from work and took us to the mall to see her and Joe's ice cream stand. She also treated us to ice cream and we each enjoyed a brand-new flavor.  Joe came home from work a little bit later and we all hung out and talked and enjoyed a sleepover party. In the morning, Andrew slept in while Mike and I left for our journey to Tennessee.  

We took a 5 hour drive over to Pigeon Forge Tennessee to see my high school friend Carrie and enjoy the Pigeon Forge area. We were very impressed with how built-up Pigeon Forge was with multiple go-cart racing and mini golf courses, a giant Ferris wheel at the island, multiple shops and restaurants along with dinner show venues. It was great to catch up with Carrie in person, reminisce about old times and share how our current lives are going. She gave us tips of things to do and her favorite attractions around the area. She gifted us with homemade treats of salsa and BBQ sauce. 

We spent the rest of the day exploring the local attractions including a museum with a life-size replica of the Titanic with an iceberg and water, there was also a huge wax museum, we just saw the outside with a King Kong replica and statues. Nearby was the Smoky Mountain Opry and next to that the Wonder Works magic exhibit which included a giant upside down Museum Building. The area was very colorful and well lit and we were fortunate to be there in the off-season so not quite crowded yet. 

Desiring some local flavor we decided to experience a dinner show at the Lumberjack feud. This was quite impressive, we had a full meal and even our server was part of the show. We were part of the Dawson family feuding with the McGraw  family as they were fighting over the last logging season before Pres. Roosevelt closed the area to develop the Smoky Mountain National Park. The show included great music by a bluegrass band and they also played a dueling banjos set that made Mike's day and week. They had horses, and dogs that raced and jumped over water and they had clogging with guys and girls.  Audience participation included a tree climbing contest, a sweeping contest and also a Slingshot contest. Lumberjacks are competitors from around the world who chop and climb their way through competition. 

 After dinner we were exhausted from a full day of driving and experiencing new sites and seeing an old friend so we headed to our hotel in nearby Gatlinburg. The hotel is situated right on the river and I enjoyed sleeping with the window open to the sounds of the flowing river.

Next morning we were up bright and early, Mike was eager to meet up with an old friend from the army and I was eager to climb to the High Point of Tennessee called Clingmans Dome located in nearby Smoky Mountain National Park. Most breakfast places weren't open so we headed into Smoky Mountain national Park to start our day. The views were gorgeous we made it before most traffic and had a very chilly experiencing experience at the high point Tennessee which is also the High Point of smoky mountains in the High Point the Appalachian Trail. Views were spectacular and reminded me of doing the top of the Rocky Mountains. A pair of hikers ahead of us but in the bear I'm kind of grateful that we did not have the same sighting. While in the park we also visited the North Carolina-Tennessee state line and part of the Appalachian Trail as it travels across the smoky mountains on the Tennessee and North Carolina state line. One of the highlights of the week was reaching my 10th state High Point and very fitting that my 10th High Point was in TENnessee.

We both worked up quite an appetite during our very cold, brisk hike up and down the to the top Clingmans Dome so we headed for a Southern style breakfast. We ate at Crockett breakfast camp and our waitress seem very southern but we found that she was from Russia. Michael had a special recipe cinnamon roll pancake breakfast well I had a Mexican omelette, sweetened apples and, new for me, corn pone. The decor of the restaurant was really cool and I would highly recommend this place

 After breakfast we headed back in the car for a two and half hour journey down to Cleveland Tennessee to visit Michael Williams a friend of Mike's from Fort Devens' days. We met up with Mike at his very cute two story house in Cleveland it was not what might Mike expected: it did not sit on a swamp and he wasn't sitting outside with a straw hat, barefoot surrounded by bullfrogs. Michael gave us a quick tour of his house, we met his adorable toy poodle Jasper and both Michaels went through an album of photos from their days at Fort Devens and during deployment and during airplane jumps. Then Mike offered to show us a little bit of Cleveland and we went to a local favorite for eating call Jenkins.  They're well-known for their chicken salad and I had to sample some, Mike ordered his favorite, a Reuben.  And a very special highlight of the trip was meeting Michael's parents Ed and Erma Williams. They have been married nearly 59 years and are the sweetest dearest Christian couple that I've ever met. They shared stories about when Michael was a young boy as well as how they met as a couple and traveled around the country while Ed was a minister. Both Ed and Erma are passionate about music and offered a guitar to Michael which was grand because he finally got to play,  "You got a line, I got a pole" which is stuck in his head from the Lumberjack show. Ed  accompanied Michael by playing his accordion that he has been playing since he was nine years old. They jammed for a little bit before we had to go, and upon leaving, Erma gave me a book and a CD that she helped compile with a friend of hers to encourage young children and it was filled with songs that she wrote and stories that her friend shared as well as a huge bag of pencils for me to get to my students. While we were all together she had me read a devotion from Oswald Chambers about suffering and it was really neat to have this fellowship together. We headed back to Michael's place as he prepared for worship rehearsal and then we said our goodbyes and headed over to Chattanooga for a quick evening Tour.

 Chattanooga was a quick 30 minutes away and we visited the Chattanooga choo-choo and station and then went down to the riverfront to walk over the Tennessee River and over to a park and finished our long walk with a delicious ice cream from the Ice Cream Show. Actually I forgot, I also squeezed in a quick Munzee (Geo-location game I play) capping session at the national Cemetery. Then we headed back to our hotel in Cleveland and enjoyed a quick night rest before our final day of Tennessee's adventures.

We checked out of the hotel in Cleveland, grabbed a very quick bite to eat and then drove over to Franklin, Tennessee. In Franklin we spent much of the day finding Munzees and I will not get into that but you can definitely ask me more if you want to know but let's just say it was pretty time-consuming because I had a goal to find as many Munzees as I could that day and still leave time for a visit up to Nashville.  In Franklin we grabbed a quick bite to eat and then headed up to Nashville for the evening. 

 Nashville was quite a sight, it maintained its historic manner and the theme was all about music. We found a parking spot and decided to walk up and down Broadway Street to explore the many open bars and clubs that had live music playing as well as check out souvenir stores and the visitor center. Broadway Street is also known as the honky-tonk highway. We were greeted by thousands of musical notes coming from panhandlers playing guitars, even a guitar made out of an old suitcase and there was a Johnny Cash look like. About two out of every three establishments was a bar or a club and the streets are filled with the aroma of cigarettes and beer.

We did pass by one barbecue place and that gave off a more delicious smell. Nashville was beautifully situated upon a river and the strip we walked was kept pretty much true to its historic days of old with lots of neon lights and architecture. Every bar had live music playing and there were street musicians at just about every corner and no cover charge to go in the bars. We stopped into the honky-tonk bar which is  actually a three-story bar with live music on each floor. We stayed for a bit to listen to a live band play where the female singer was actually standing on a nearby bar table singing and asking for donations if you wanted her to change her song. All that walking in Nashville worked up our appetites so that we could experience a hometown neighbor's, Scott Brown, favorite eatery called The Golden Corral. We found one located halfway between Nashville and our hotel for the night which is near Knoxville. Michael stuffed himself crazy with all kinds of meats and a few vegetables but he went back for seconds and maybe thirds of the ribs. Quote from Michael, "the food was ridiculous."  I had a very healthy salad and then sampled a few of the main dishes before moving onto my favorite part of the restaurant which was the dessert. I had cotton candy and sampled all the chocolate fountains. They had a milk chocolate fountain, white chocolate fountain and a Caramel fountain and that was the bulk of my dinner. One thing that I kept running into over and over again in the south was how nice all the people were. Especially noticeable was that if you went to child and said something they didn't shy away or run away or go gravitate to their parents they just joined and then trusted you and that was very nice. We headed to our hotel in a place called Lenore city and early the next morning I checked my Munzee score and found that I did place third in the world for the day, so it was well worth it. We woke up rather early, found a nearby Dunkin' Donuts to start our ride home. The week was definitely a whirlwind a lot of driving and we only stayed in each hotel one night, so we're constantly packing and unpacking and packing again and on the move but it was great to take in so much of Tennessee in such a short amount of time and definitely give us a taste for what we would like to see again.