Trip to Knoxville

This wasn't a motorcycle journey, though that was the original plan. My buddy Daryl from Cincinnati and I planned to meet for lunch at Spooky Frasier's Barbecue in Knoxville, a good halfway point for us. It turned out that my girlfriend Donna had Friday and Saturday off from work, which is a rarity for her, so we decided to make it an overnight trip.

We left Friday morning and arrived at the Knoxville Zoo around noon and enjoyed it until they closed at 4:30. It was a nice zoo, but I personally like ours here in Columbia a lot better. It was a perfect day for spending outdoors - around 80 degrees with a light breeze.






We left the zoo and headed to a pair of adjacent cemeteries, a regular one and a national one. We found some really cool tombstones there.








After the cemetery we headed over to the campus of the University of Tennessee. We visited the war dog memorial at the vet school, dedicated to the dogs used by the marine corps in WWII.


Also at UT we visited their amazing rose garden; it was such a serene place; I could spend hours there with a good book. They had the most amazing wind chimes; the tubes were about 2" in diameter, 1/4" thick, and 4' long; they made the most incredible resonant tones.


Couple more shots from UT:



We concluded Friday evening with dinner and a lazy evening at the hotel.

Saturday morning I visited a Yamaha/Honda motorcycle dealership while Donna went and ate breakfast. They had lots of bikes with plenty of room to sit on them, but as is not uncommon, they didn't have much at all in the way of gear, and hardly anything was priced. Thumbs down.

We then headed into downtown and knocked around there for awhile. As I've seen in some other cities, they have animals painted by local artists around town; in this case, it was bears and dogs. Here's one of the dogs, next to a cowboy sculpture:


We caught a bluegrass band jamming; they were really good, especially the young fellow on the banjo.


We then met Daryl for lunch at Smokehouse BBQ. Any place that has their smokers out front promises to be good! And they were. The meat was nice and smoky and would have been fine without sauce. We had a good time visiting for a couple of hours, and then Daryl hit the road to head back to Cincinnati. Donna and I went and enjoyed a couple of hours at the riverwalk before heading homeward.


The drive home went pretty well, though it got a bit rainy and foggy in mountainous regions of I-40.