Condo Trip 2024: Knoxville & Lake Lure 2

This is part two of a series that you ought to read in order. To get to Part One, click here (or click "older post" at the bottom, if you're not on the mobile site. All the pictures from this trip can be viewed here. All of my pictures, I believe, are captioned, so you don't have to just guess at what you're looking at. In some applications, the captions show at the bottom of the photo; otherwise, when you view the pictures in Google Photos, you'll see a little "Information" icon at the top right -- an "i" in a circle. Click on that to read the captions. 

The Add-On: Knoxville 

Wednesday, May 15, & Thursday, May 16

We met up with Nancy and Jeff at the Asheville airport just as planned, at the baggage claim; then headed over to the rental car counter (so that I can be listed as a driver of the vehicle we get; it's the whole reason we always meet at the airport). Unlike some airports, Asheville had the good sense to put the rental car counters right next to the baggage claim. There were maybe 8 or 10 companies with counters there. Hertz, the company Nancy has always used in the past because of the discounts available to her, had two customers waiting; Alamo (I think it was) had two or three; and Avis, the company Nancy used this year (because, even with Hertz's relevant discounts, Avis was now less expensive) had maybe thirty people in line. 

 We finally got to the front of the line. Nancy had decided to reserve a minivan this year, because all the small SUVs we've used in past years have been too small for all the luggage. It's always been a problem but since Jeff's had to start using oxygen and bringing a walker, it's become a serious problem. The van she'd reserved was in the garage, but the clerk noted that "a nicer car" had just been returned; and since Nancy had been so much more polite to the clerk than the guy in line before us, she said she would get us that car if we were willing to wait about 30 minutes for them to clean it and gas it up. At that point, we figured, what was another 30 minutes? Between waiting for them to deplane and waiting for the car line, we'd been hanging around for nearly an hour and a half already; and we really had nowhere to be in a hurry. So, sure, we'll wait. Well, it was only about 15 minutes before she called out to us. 

 What we've got this year is a gigantic Chrysler Pacifica van. I've been doing most of the driving, and I take pride in my driving abilities, but I have yet to get that boat into a parking place on the first try without going over the line. Also, I hit my head almost every time I get into it. And as with all unfamiliar cars, the location of controls and the details of their use is something of a mystery; for instance, I haven't been able to figure out how to turn off the radio. (We did figure out how to pair Nancy's phone, so we get Google Maps directions through the stereo. And I figured out how to delete all the previously paired phones.) I do like the GPS display, which even when we're not following directions somewhere shows where we are. Not sure if that's coming through Nancy's phone or if it's just something the car is programmed for. 

 We drove across Asheville to our hotel, We were tired from driving (and hiking up the hill at Foxfire) and Jeff & Nancy were tired from their flight (they'd had to be up at some ungodly hour to get a shuttle to the Denver airport), so we went to a nearby restaurant for dinner, then called it a day. We went for breakfast Thursday morning at a place Sherry had picked out, which turned out to be the breakfast area of another hotel -- why would that be listed on Google Maps? -- so we ended up at a local spot we had seen on the way. It was very good and if I weren't so tired now I'd look it up. But since I'll probably never be back in Asheville for breakfast I just don't care enough to do that.

Looking Glass Falls

 At some point along the trip, Sherry and I decided that we should constitute ourselves as the Fog & Scaffold travel club. The drive from Asheville to Knoxville fulfilled the fog part, and now that we're in Knoxville we've taken care of the scaffolding part. It seems ubiquitous here. Along the way, we stopped to see Looking Glass Falls and the Sliding Rock, both in the Pisgah National Forest, which used to be part of the Vanderbilt estate. We also stopped at the "Cradle of Forestry" site nearby, a place commemorating the forestry school set up by (George) Vanderbilt in the late 1800s, when his Biltmore Estate was getting started, with the idea of training people to manage the forests he owned for the long term. That unplanned stop turned out to be an interesting hour spent.

As I was mapping out our planned route to Knoxville, I noticed that there was a marker for Cold Mountain. The Charles Frazier novel Cold Mountain has been one of my favourite novels since it came out in 1997; it was also made into a really good movie a few years later. It hadn't occurred to me that the title mountain was an actual place, and this was it. So even though there's nothing of significance there, I made it a point to make a stop at the base of that mountain, just so I could get a picture of it, to remind me, from time to time when I see it, of the magic of that novel. And here is that picture:

Cold Mountain, North Carolina: a real place

From there, we drove over to the town of Franklin, where there's a Scottish Tartan Museum. Jeff, who says that the McNairs might be part of any of three clans, and that he doesn't know which his family is part of, went into the museum, but said not a single word about the experience. (I stayed in the car, intending to take a short nap. This possibility was obviated when the ugliest and most garrulous woman in Franklin, North Carolina, set up her checker board on the sidewalk next to me and engaged her grotesquely fat goitered friend, who had obviously never played checkers before, in a match.)

View from the Skyway

 The drive along the Cherohala Skyway was made mostly in a light rain. It's beautiful scenery the whole way, but also Nancy started reading to us from memoirs written fifty years ago by Jeff's grandmother, Annie Woody McNair. She had an interesting life -- not famous or adventurous or anything, but interesting nonetheless -- growing up in western Virginia and Kentucky in the early 20th Century. Even the mundane events reveal interesting differences between life then and now. Nothing makes you realize how good we've got it these days than hearing the details of life a hundred years ago.

 At one point it rained buckets, but at that moment we just happened to be in the Jukebox Junction, having lunch. I had a buffalo chicken sandwich that I regretted the rest of the day. And just as we finished lunch, the rain stopped and the clouds lifted.

  There are some graduation-related events taking place in Knoxville, home to the University of Tennessee's main campus; so all the local hotels have jacked their rates up to the max, and as a consequence our hotel is ... well, not quite in the boondocks, but not really in town. We're about 8 or 10 miles east of the city. We didn't care; we didn't figure to do a lot of commuting into town: maybe once in the morning, and back in the evening. So this morning (Thursday) we piled into the van, went for breakfast at an excellent little coffee shop downtown, called Pete's, where we planned the things we wanted to do and see while we're here. Our waitress helped out with several recommendations and excellent food.

Crawdaddy Jones

 One of the unexpected things we fell into was a live performance on the local NPR station, WDVX, which puts on a music show called "The Blue Plate Special" every weekday at noon. We took the free trolley to the station and listened to two performances: first a singer-songwriter from Alabama named BB Palmer, who was pretty good, though I thought his lyrics didn't quite hit the mark. Then came a duo called Crawdaddy Jones, who were pretty close to awesome. I was seriously tempted to try to go to their other upcoming performances around town while we're local, but it would have meant skipping too many other plans.

 Following that, we walked around the corner to Market Square to begin our sightseeing for the day, but Jeff, who had neglected to take his meds the night before and had run out of oxygen somehow, and was dizzy and having heart palpitations or something, decided he needed to go back to the hotel. So I went and got the car, brought it up to Market Square, and Nancy drove him to the hotel, made sure everything was okay with him (or as okay as was possible), then came back to meet Sherry and me downtown. While she was doing that, Sherry and I visited the Eastern Tennessee History Museum, which turned out to be much more interesting than expected. She concentrated on exhibits about local music, while I went for exhibits about the Civil War in this part of the state. We were both happy with the time we spent there. 

Sunsphere (in 2017)

 Nancy got back a couple of hours later and the three of us went up to the observation deck of the Sunsphere, the little tower built for the 1982 World's Fair. It was a little tatty and not at all impressive as a belvedere, but it was only $5 a person. Because the tower is built at the bottom of a hill, the view is limited to the downtown area on the east, the low mountains on the south, west and north, and the university precincts. But the young woman who staffs the place had some suggestions of other things to see, one of which (Volunteer Landing, on the waterfront) was the last thing we did before returning to the hotel.

 But before that, we went across the river hoping to get a good view of the city from over there, where there are a couple of low mountains that should have provided for it. I found a web site detailing prospective locations. The first was called The High Ground, and there was a photo on the web site, supposedly taken this year, showing exactly what I was looking for. 

what was promised

 So we headed over there. 

 The web site lied. I mean, they lied. THIS is the actual view we found at The High Ground, a city park:

 

 

 

what we saw

 No way all those trees grew in just a few months. By the time we'd made the hike from the parking lot to the High Ground -- something the author of the web site's column obviously never did -- it was too late to pursue the city views any longer; so we went for dinner at a place back in Market Square, then down to Volunteer Landing, then back to the hotel for the night, exhausted.

Friday, May 17

  This is the day we spent exploring the town of Sevierville. It began with an early-morning drive to Seven Islands State Birding Park, in the eastern part of Knox County. It was drizzly while we were there, and all the benches outdoors were wet; so I sat on a bench in the barn near the entrance, close to the end of the building, where I could hear the birds even if I couldn't see them. (I did, however, see an indigo bunting, a beautiful little bright blue bird; it was in the road as we neared the park, and I got a good look at it just as it flew away.) 

Tennessee Aviation Museum

 We went into Sevierville (pronounced suh-VEER-vull; a major point of contention in our little group) to see a mural and a statue in the town center, but because they were setting up for a barbecue-and-beer festival that started in the evening, we had to park a ways away and walk it. Then back to the car and had breakfast at a cute little bakery-cafe a mile down the road before we went to the Tennessee Aviation Museum, at the Gatlinburg-Pigeon Forge airport. The displays of local aviation history were interesting, as was a longish movie about the role of the P-47 Thunderbolt in the Italian campaign during World War II. But the displays of actual aircraft in the attached hangar were really disappointing. There were a few intact aircraft, mostly unrestored, including several MiGs (which were interesting for their novelty), but mostly there were sections and pieces (including an engine and part of the cockpit assembly of a P-47 Thunderbolt that had crashed and burned) and movie-use mockups of aircraft, which was of slight interest. And the signage for the displays used a great deal of military jargon in lieu of actual information; that may make those who are in the know puff their chests out a little but to us civilians it means less than nothing. It's like when officials are interviewed on TV and use that mechanistic institutional-speak they seem so fond of.

 From there we drove over to a covered bridge from the 1890s that Sherry & Nancy particularly wanted to see. While we were there I finally figured out how to shut the radio up. (It comes on every time we start the car and there's not "off" button; all I can do is switch to Sirius, which is just as bad, or USB, which at least stops it for the one trip, until we re-start the car after a stop. But I discovered at the covered bridge that if I turn the volume down to 0, it won't mute the Google Maps instructions. So that's as good as turning it off.)

 Next stop was a complex of shops relating to apples: a cider works, a candy shop, a creamery, a winery and two restaurants. I had a scoop of apple-walnut fudge ice cream while Sherry and Nancy went off to buy cider for the condo (if it lasts that long); then we had a late lunch in one of the restaurants there, which for Sherry and I was mostly left over for dinner, in the hotel room, in the evening. I found the entire series of enterprises somewhat overpriced, though the quality of everything was high. Maybe I was just feeling grumpy? It's been known to happen, though never without just cause.

 Anyway, after lunch we hit up a moonshine distillery called Shine Girl, where Sherry and Nancy tasted a flight of six distillations before selecting two to take to the condo: Red Velvet Cake and Lavender. I tried the Red Velvet Cake; it does taste like fermented red velvet cake, but it's not as good as the Salted Caramel we got in Dubois PA a few years ago, the flavour that started us on our 'shine appreciation course.

 Our last stop of the day was at the world's largest knife store, which is sort of like a Cabela's or a Bass Pro Shop. They have every model of every knife made, and all kinds of other outdoor gear. But the excitement of that was overshadowed by the news that Kaylee, our great-niece and Nancy and Jeff's granddaughter, had been selected for concert choir back home in Colorado. After getting that news, we didn't talk a lot about the knife store, the name of which I forget.

Saturday, May 18

 After long discussion of the available routes and distances involved, we finally decided that our trip to the condo in Lake Lure would be by way of a backyard display of dinosaurs, now called Backyard Terrors, in Bluff City, Tennessee. I had seen this amazing collection of hobbyist-constructed critters seven years ago, and even though they got barely a mention in this blog, I've felt ever since that this was one of the most fascinating sights I've ever come across in all my wandering around. Definitely a Top-Ten place. The other options were to drive straight down the interstate, or go through the National Park, or take the Tail of the Dragon scenic route. Interstate 40 is pretty through the mountains, but it's still just a four-lane highway and nothing special; and we like our travels to be as special as we can conveniently make them. The route through the park is likely to be heavy traffic (and rain) and not much different than what we saw on the Cherohala Skyway; plus there's a good chance we will take a full day to explore the park during our condo week anyway (even though it's about an hour and a half drive from where we'll be staying). And the Tail of the Dragon, which I've driven before, is no more exciting than the Cherohala Skyway; the two routes run parallel about 40 miles apart. The only difference is that the Tail of the Dragon has more traffic, especially motorcycles, as it's a pretty well-known scenic drive, while Cherohala is kind of a well-kept secret.

 And so that's what we did, pretty much. On the drive up to the dinosaur park, Nancy finished reading the memoirs of Jeff's grandmother, and we listened to an episode of a podcast called Empire. This one was about the history of the East India Company in India. None of us had known that the Battle of Plassy, which enabled a small Company army to defeat the Mughal and French forces, turned on the fact that it rained. The Company army was surrounded, about to be ripped to shreds, when the skies opened. The Mughal army didn't cover their gunpowder; the English did. After the storm passed, the Mughal cavalry attacked and were destroyed by the English cannon fire. Amazing. 

one of the new statues

 The Backyard Terrors Dinosaur Park was, as expected, terrific. Quite a few new dinosaur statues have been added since I saw the place seven years ago, and it seems like the owner must've bought some more property to expand into. Some of these new dinosaurs appear to be built with an entirely different method; they seem so Polished, like they were bought instead of assembled.

 In our planning of the drive to the condo, I'd forgotten that my car was still waiting for us at the hotel in Asheville, so we had to add that into our plans. It only added fifteen or twenty minutes to the trip, except that as we started for Lake Lure from there, Google Maps wouldn't talk to me, and I couldn't see the screen because of the sun, so we started off by missing every turn and having to make one U-turn after another. I finally pulled over and told Nancy to take the lead and I'd just follow her. We got to the condo office around 5:15. The condo office turns out to be miles from the actual condo, so it was about 6pm before we started unloading our stuff.