Nashville To Chattanooga And Beyond

 We got home yesterday from Virginia, tired but very happy that we took the ACL cruise and got to bracket the cruise with visits with my family. We arrived in Roanoke early in the afternoon of the 8th and checked into our hotel, the Hotel Roanoke And Conference Center. The hotel is old and grand and originally opened in 1882. If I recall, it was rebuilt after a fire. The hotel is also quite large, quite a step up from the Tru in Pigeon Forge. After settling in, we walked over the pedestrian walkway that traverses the train station and set out to explore a bit of downtown Roanoke. We were able to go to the Museum of Art prior to it closing for the day and enjoyed strolling through the galleries and seeing the art pieces on display. We entered a store where the woman who worked there, a native of Roanoke told us where not to walk, so we took her advice and made our way through a bit more of downtown. As we made our way back to the hotel, we answered the siren call of an ice cream sto...

Patti reminded me that I forgot to include the real highlight of our time in Chattanooga, Ruby Falls. After we picked up the car we made our way back to Chattanooga and went to Ruby Falls, an indoor waterfall in Lookout Mountain. It is truly spectacular. To get there, you need to drive up a windy road. Once you have parked the car you enter the building and buy your tickets and then conveniently wait in the gift shop until your tour is called and you descend 260 feet in an elevator to the beginning of the tour through a limestone cavern. The falls were accidentally discovered by Leo Lambert in 1928 after he crawled through a very narrow passage for 17 hours until he came to a place where he could stand and walk and he ended up discovering the falls which he named after his wife Ruby. He and a team sank an elevator shaft and started working on making a path through the limestone walls. Along the way there are numerous stalagmites and stalactites that have been forming for millions of ye...

It's been a few days so I will do my best to update what we have been up to. We arrived in Florence, AL and on our first morning there we set out for a loop tour of Florence on the provided bus. The tour got off to an inauspicious start as we discovered that the entire area of the loop had no power, so we decided to stay on the bus, make the loop, and hope the power would come back on. On our second go round we got off the bus and went to the art museum that was the first stop. Here the inauspiciousness continued as there was still no power and no art on display because the museum was between exhibits, so we made our way on foot to stop 2, Popes Tavern. It was at Popes Tavern that the lights came back on. The docent told us Popes Tavern was probably never a tavern, so the truth was stretched a tad to make it a more interesting sounding tourist stop. It did serve as a hospital for both Confederate and Union troops in the Civil War and had Civil War artifacts on display. Feeling enco...

   We left Savannah, TN this morning and are now on our way to Florence, AL. We hit our first minor glitch yesterday in Savannah. We had a leisurely morning which was a good idea because we ran into some rain yesterday, but we stayed dry and warm onboard and were able to exercise and do some laundry. After lunch, we boarded a bus for our excursion to The Tennessee River Museum and Main St. in Savannah. To our surprise, the ride to the museum was about 3 minutes long. It was when we got to the the museum that the glitch started to occur. There was conflicting information about when the bus would return to the boat, but while we were in the museum the mystery was solved and we had a definite time of departure for the three minute ride back to the boat. If you are thinking we could have walked, you are correct; but since they count bus passengers we decided to explore Main St and see what Savannah had to offer after visiting the museum. In the museum there were Civil War displays...

   We arrived in Grand River, Kentucky yesterday around noon. We are here rather than Paducah because the water in Paducah is too high, or something like that. After we had lunch onboard we disembarked and boarded a bus bound for Paducah, where the Cumberland and Ohio Rivers converge, and a tour of The Loop. The trip was about 30-40 minutes by bus. The coaches we were on did the loop in a hop on hop off fashion so we were free to see what we chose to see. A local from Paducah was on the bus and provided narration for some of the sights we saw as we did The Loop. We got off and toured the National Quilt Museum which is an absolute must see if you ever find yourself in Paducah. From a distance, the quilts look like paintings and they are all exquisite. Patti, who is a quilter, was especially impressed with the fine stitching and explained how time consuming and labor intensive doing such stitching is. There was a very big quilt show the week before we arrived and the top three q...

  We got to the Opryland Hotel and Convention Center and are now in the care of American Cruise Lines. We arrived in Nashville on Sunday and after checking in to our hotel we did a bit of a walkabout in order to get the lay of the land. One thing became immediately obvious, especially once we got to Broadway where the bars are located: Country Western music rules in Nashville. (Sidebar: if you absolutely despise Country Western music, do not come to Nashville). The District, aka Broadway, is lined with bars, restaurants, and merchants and each bar and restaurant has LOUD, VERY LOUD musicians and singers. Occasionally, the stage is right next to the street and the stage is visible from the street......and the window, aka sliding glass door,  is wide open.....so the decibels are off the scale. It was surprising to us that so many people were out on a Sunday night. Trust me, crowds like that do not happen where both Patti and I live. Being in The District is now in the been there...