After a good night’s sleep, we enjoyed the usual Holiday Inn Express breakfast. They provided small paper grab breakfast bags for people who only had time for breakfast on the go. We had our usual fill and then also took a bag each with some goodies to add to our picnic lunch.
The revelation was they had a Costa fresh brew coffee machine. We cannot recall seeing the brand Costa anywhere in the USA before. Karen was very excited and very pleased with the coffee. It also dispensed boiling hot water for my tea which was very acceptable as well.
Today we still had a long journey ahead to Nashville despite having already done part of the journey and staying here overnight at Knoxville. Nevertheless, we felt we should at least see a bit of Knoxville before moving on and so drove downtown to the site of the 1982 World Fair.
Downtown was totally deserted. We located the site easily enough with the large Sunsphere building one of the only original buildings left from 1982. Christened the Lords Golf Tee, it is a large gold ball on top of a tower.
Eventually we found a parking spot and walked to the tower. As we were too early for it to be open, we wandered along a very pretty and pleasant lake with fountains where we sat for a while reading about the World Fair. The UK had had a pavilion which had a Rose and Crown pub serving Fish & Chips – sounds familiar?
The fair attracted 11 million visitors and seemed to be known for a few things. Cherry coke was first sold here; there was an early demonstration of touch screen technology and the world’s largest Rubiks cube was on display in the Hungary pavilion (which we came across later when going to the toilet in the convention centre). Also, apparently later The Simpsons visited it in an episode – and they had the original script from it at the top of the tower.
The view from the top was good but not spectacular and barely worth the $10 admission each. It was one of those buildings that looked better from afar.
And with that we walked back to the car and set out for a 2-hour drive to Rock Island State Park which although not on the direct route to Nashville we hoped would be worth the detour.
It was a long drive that we broke up with another Desert Island Disc podcast – this time Cyndi Lauper. Eventually we arrived at the park which was free to enter and popped in the small visitors centre to use the restrooms and get hints of what to see.
For our picnic they suggested a quiet point overlooking the gorge and river. It was quite peaceful and even I got interested in watching the birds. Karen was not happy when vultures started settling in the trees overhead especially when I said it was because they could see the bears encircling us and they wanted any of our entails left after we had been mauled.
After our picnic, Karen made sure we had cleared away any debris for bears to smell before we walked 100 yards to a small waterfall coming out of the rocks and tumbling below us. It was amazing the volume of water that was flowing non-stop.
From here we drove to the Great Falls Trail which strangely was just before the entrance to the park. The trail was only 0.5 miles but marked as strenuous. And it was. It was all down steep steps which the further you went down the wetter they became. In fact, the steps cut of the rocks seemed form their own waterfall. Karen gave up about ¼ of the way down. I manfully carried onto the bottom. It wasn’t worth the effort because unless like some other people had you were prepared to wander across the river, the views of the great falls were better from the top.
The more worrying fact was the river was being fed by a dam for the hydroelectric plant which had controlled (and uncontrolled) releases which were preceded by a siren. At that point everyone had to get back up the 0.5 miles of steep steps as the gorge could fill rapidly. The signs said that 102 people had drowned there over recent years. I am not sure why people are allowed down at all with that being the case and wished I had read the signs when at the top and not the bottom!
The drive onto Nashville was not great. The freeways had lots of potholes, narrow lanes and was very busy. I had to navigate frequent junctions to the left and right of me. The truck drivers were the worse driving way over the speed limit and changing lanes at will whether or not you were in the way. It was a stressful drive, and I was glad when we got to the hotel in one respect. In another though I wasn’t.
The hotel was described as in the best area of Nashville, in fact one where Cousin Nicole Kidman and her husband Keith Urban live. I would describe as being as at the end of a road in the not nicest neighbourhood that leads to that area.
When I went in to check in there were a couple arguing on the phone about some hotel booking or another and that did not help my mood.
We were having role reversal as Karen was quite calm about the situation. In fact, once in our room the stress of the drive had rescinded after two cuppas, and I felt much better about it all. The room was standard and the guy at reception had been most helpful about agreeing to change our bookings to leave here one day earlier. I did have an online chat argument with Hotels.com which I quite rightly won, and they refunded me in full.
For dinner we first headed to a local BBQ restaurant but didn’t go in as Karen didn’t like it from the outside. Our back up plan was to go to the nearest Five Guys which we hadn’t had for some time and jolly good it was too. We used the Coke freestyle machine to share a caffeine-free vanilla coke zero.
Next to the Five Guys was a great book shop which stocked a good mixture of new and second-hand books. I could have spent hours in there but sadly we only had 20 minutes as they were closing. I could have bought loads but was severely restricted by being able to get them into my suitcase.
Back in the room Karen managed to find Shark Tank on the TV and watched a couple of episodes. I gave up after one and retired for the night.
