After leaving Monticello, we headed east towards the Blue Ridge Parkway, the Great Smokie Mountains, and all that Appalachia has to offer. While we got to experience an amazing variety of regional experiences, we came away feeling like we'd only just scratched the surface of what this incredibly wonderful and complex region is all about.
Highlights included:
HIKING - The Blue Ridge Mountains couldn't be more different from our Sierras, but especially lovely in their fall colors
BIG CITIES - From our west coast viewpoint, cities like Cleveland, Nashville & Knoxville almost don't seem real because our stereotypes are so ingrained. Instead of feeling put off by some rust belt relics of a prior age, we came away with a new appreciation for the attractions that continue to draw people to them.
SITE SEEING - If you'd asked us 6 months ago, in what state we might stumble on the most interesting distractions along the road, I don't think we'd have said Kentucky. From Corvettes and caves, it just goes to show how little we really knew about the Bluegrass State.
The Great Smokies, aka The Blue Ridge Mountains /
It turns out that the Great Smoky National Park is just a part of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which in turn are just a part of the Appalachian Range. So they're all "kinda the same thing". We drove down the spine of the Blue Ridge Parkway, randomly stopping to take in the sights and the colors of the final fall leaves, finally finishing up with our 3rd national park of the trip. It really looks nothing like hiking in either California or Montana or Maine did. More and more though, we're coming to appreciate how much hiking helps you connect with the land and what makes each region special.
The "mountains" are smaller, but they are relentless. The forests are incredibly thick and varied with tree species (and frogs and snakes) that we found fascinating. Amid the endless see of rolling hills and never ending streams and forests, you feel just as far from "civilization" as you do on the John Muir Trail. It's very easy to see this as America's first frontier.
"One experience in each big city"
Places like Knoxville, which has a metro area population of just under a Million people, are a bit larger than our usual target for exploring. Yet, there were a bunch of these cities we were dying to see, so our strategy turned out to be to try to find at least one great site or experience in each place that we could enjoy.
KNOXVILLE: SEC football. Neither one of us has ever been too much of a football fan even by west coast standards, so we figured we were REALLY different from the average SEC football fan. So when it turned out that Tennesse (then ranked #1 in the country) was playing #2 Georgia while we were in Knoxville (home of Univ. of Tennessee) we figured we had to find a way to experience it.
Unfortunately the game was being played in Georgia, so we did the next best thing and found a sports bar in Knoxville to watch it in. (Coincidentally the Athletic had a writer in the bar at the same time doing this story about the experience) The beginning of the game was raucous -- fans had clearly been pregaming for HOURS prior to the 2pm kickoff. The whole bar sang Rocky Top at the top of their lungs -- to which Joan asked, "why??" and I couldn't really answer except to say, "It's a thing." . . . we'll have to do more research on that one. The first few minutes of the game were exciting and there were high fives all over the bar when the Vols recovered a Georgia fumble, but that was the last highlight on a disappointing afternoon, so in the end it was just "football in a bar" for Joan.
The one other big memory I'll have was of talking with the VERY grizzled old Tennessee alum on the bar stool next to me. He had a very bad back and a big of a shake in his hands, but was sporting a well loved Tennessee hat. He was full of fun (but very hard to hear) stories about how he was a baseball player at the university when he was young, but also played football and hurt his back when he got speared by another player, and it's a shame that players don't play multiple sports anymore. He spent the day drinking double fisted: a pint in one hand and a double-shot of Jagermeister in the other. But his most memorable moment came when he paused and looked around at all the excited, white faces in this particular bar and said, "Looks like a Klan rally in here." I looked around and agreed that there were indeed no African Americans in the bar and then tried to ask if he'd ever actually been to a Klan rally, but his mind had already moved on to another thought and couldn't seem to go back. My impression from his tone was that he was self-aware enough to feel that this wasn't the way things should be, but I might be just projecting there. I wish I'd handled that moment better.
Joan and I also played a bit of golf in Knoxville, with a few fraternity boys from the University -- including one making a big show of smoking a cigar at 10am on a Saturday morning! And for some reason, our evening menu featured something called "Memphis Sushi" that may just have been a dig at Western Tennessee because it wasn't sushi at all. It was Sausage, Paprika cheese, and pickles. Weird, but very tasty.
NASHVILLE: I gotta be honest here. I don't yet see the attraction of Nashville. Lots of bars and drinking and really great music. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood for it, but it seemed like just a brand extension of Las Vegas. I'm glad that Kid Rock is doing well for himself, but maybe if I'd been on a bachelor party and wearing cowboy boots I'd have gotten into the vibe more. The music was great, but maybe we have to try it again some other time to really sink our teeth into Nashville.
LOUISVILLE: When in Louisville it has to be Churchill Downs that you first think of. So we went and played the ponies. We studied the sheet and tried our best to make reasonable bets, but there's a reason they call it gambling. :-). We won 1 of our 4 bets on the two races we saw, so in the end we bet $20 and won $16. Not bad for a day at the races.
That was fun, but maybe the unexpected memory that will stick the longest is of the murals on so many of the city walls. The Louisville tributes to "Hometown Heros" consists of giant banners or wraps on the sides of buildings downtown that commemorate famous Louisville-ites that run the gamut from Muhammad Ali & Pee Wee Reese to Colonel Saunders, Diane Sawyer, and NPR's Bob Edwards. The list is impressive (see here ). Who know Louisville had spawned such a collection?
Of course, when we found people who we didn't recognize we looked them up. The one that most struck me was Alberta Jones. She was the first African American woman to pass the bar exam in Kentucky and was the first female prosecutor in Louisville. She was a very early champion of voting rights, a lawyer for Muhammad Ali, and as a prosecutor worked on domestic violence cases, getting abusive white husbands put in jail. She was brutally murdered in 1965 in a case that was written about recently, but which remains unsolved to this day.
CLEVELAND: In a classic example of our Loop-de-loop navigation style, before we headed to North Carolina's beaches, we decided to divert to visit our friends Mark & Lora in Cleveland (yes, kinda in the opposite direction). Cleveland also was highly recommended to us by Sue Schlickeisen in D.C. especially for the waterfront and the Rock & Roll Hall of fame. Both the city and the HOF lived up to that billing, inspite of the cold front the roared in while we were there. It was especially nice to see Mark and Lora and their son Tyler who'd been one of Adam's best friends when he was younger. I'll never forget them juggling soccer balls for hours and hours and challenging each other to break the "new record".
Lora took us on a great driving tour of the city -- so that now we know why the Cleveland Indians got renamed the Guardians. It's not just some random, dumb word they picked out of the dictionary, but actual statues towering over Clevelands Hope Memorial Bridge. (Here's more of the history about the "guardians of traffic"). But the best part of the tour was the amazing West Side Market that we got to shop at. We just couldn't stop taking pictures of all the amazing and varied foods on display. When you think of Cleveland, this is NOT the usual picture!
Oh by the way, this last picture is an example of Lora rolling out the epic Ohio culinary spread! "Breakfast for 4" really means "Lets see how many different, yummy things I can cook in an hour". Lora loved our old family saying of "I'd rather be looking at it than looking for it". Maybe the Joss family tree has a Cleveland branch we don't know about??
Other Sites we stumbled upon and loved
The National Corvette Museum AND the GM Corvette Factory in Bowling Green, KY . . . We were cruising up I-65 past Bowling Green and stumbled on the Corvette museum and factory there. Since we missed the Ford plant tour when we zipped past Dearborn, this was an opportunity that we just couldn't pass up. Did you know that a sink hole opened up under the museum once and swallowed up 8 classic old vettes? It turns out that much of Kentucky sits above a massive network of caves and every once in a while cave and earth intertwine in a sink hole. Here's a great story about it. Obviously we couldn't take pictures of the inside of the GM plant, but it was amazing to see everything come together to build those beautiful cars.
The Heaven Hill Distillery in Bardstown, KY - It turns out that the campground we stayed at in Bardstown was less than a mile from the Heaven Hill bourbon operation, so a tour was a must. . . AFTER breakfast at Mammy's Kitchen which we really can't recommend highly enough! If you've never toured a distillery or a rick house (where the bourbon ages) it's a fascinating tour. Almost enough to make you like the taste of bourbon. While we get the attraction for some people, we're thinking we still need like our brown liquor with a little mixer!
The Bristol Motor Speedway and the nearby, but slightly less famous former home of the Gray family dairy (ask El about it) Sadly there were no NASCAR races on the schedule, but we had to run by Bristol just to get a sense of the scale. If you thought football stadiums were big, you don't know big! Even the storage lot for the portapotties was huge. The bottom pictures are what we think are the remnants of the Gray Family dairy. Interestingly the two sites are connected because in 1960 El's great-grandfather sold part of the dairy to Bill France (founder of NASCAR). Fun fact for the day. . . but we DEFINITELY need to go back to experience a NASCAR race sometime. Unfortunately, racing season doesn't start up again until the spring.
Other sites along the way
There was just too too much about these three states that we found fascinating. The crazy energy of the cities balanced by a lot of the hard life, abandoned cars and loud Christianity of the country. Incredibly beautiful hills and fields, combined with fried green tomatoes, fried chicken, and, the ability to add "beer cheese" to any dish on the menu.
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