Knoxville, Nashville and a Change of Plans

Where do I begin with today? I guess at the beginning...

We got to the Mabry Hazen house in Knoxville a few minutes before opening time (the hours posted at the house and on the website are Wednesday - Friday 11 - 4 and I think maybe 10 - 4 on Saturday. I had read the website that there was a cemetery nearby, Bethel Cemetery, that the museum folks oversee. It's a Civil War cemetery.

"You Have Arrived"

We decided to check out the cemetery since we had some time. We used our GPS and we knew the cemetery is on Bethel Road. We made up a number -- bad idea. I'll post the picture later of where we ended up, but lets just say the cemetery is not in one of Knoxville's upscale neighborhoods. So, we turned around on Bethel Road and went the other direction since our "You Have Arrived" destination was on a cul de sac. Really, I didn't know neighborhoods like that had cul de sacs.

Anyway, we turned around and saw a cemetery inside a chain link fence. And beside this cemetery is another chain link fence with a house in need of repair and a paint job -- it fit the neighborhood -- inside and a black cat on the roof and a sign that says the Bethel Cemetery is open on Saturdays or by appointment. Excuse me, an appointment -- for a cemetery? So we drove around the block and wandered through the first cemetery and looked through the chain link fence at the Bethel Cemetery and couldn't really see anything. Kind of a disappointing start to the day, but we were ready for adventure, so on to the Mabry Hazen House we went.

So we drove back through what Abi called a "sketch" neighborhood and into the parking lot of the Mabry House house about 10 minutes before opening time. Great. We figured we could walk around and take pictures of the outside, which we did - I'll post those pictures, later, too, assuming I can figure it out...

Abi and I discovered that we are a lot alike. We don't take "normal" pictures. We take some people pictures, but neat stuff floats our boats, such as free standing spigots and strange tree trunks and cool looking rocks stuff like that.

We finish our pictures - and I'm talking pictures of every side of the house -- and it's about 2 minutes til 11 and no one has shown up yet. Hmmm. Maybe the employee (it can't really have more than one at a time there I wouldn't think, it's not a very big house) is running late for some reason...

Abi and Alex Haley

There's a park across the street where Abi saw a really big statue that she wanted to see up close, so we cross the street where there is a WAY bigger than lifesize statue of Alex Haley (you know, the author of Roots). I've got a picture of that with Abi beside him. She wanted to crawl in his lap, but after she found the wasps decided that wasn't such a good idea. (No, she didn't get stung). After we took our pictures there and played on the adjacent playground for a few minutes, back to the Mabry Hazen House we went. Where there still was no one but us.

At this point, I called the number posted on the door and a young man answered, "Hello". I asked about the hours at the Mabry Hazen House and he said, "Oh. It's an administrative day, but we'll be open tomorrow...and next week." Great we'll be in other places then. Oh well. Plans change. We're resilient....next destination, Nashville.

And we drive until lunchtime and stop at a Waffle House. Did you know it's National Waffle Week? I didn't either. Better have a waffle before tomorrow if you want to celebrate. We walked in the Waffle House as someone is hanging up the red phone that says "Only Use to Call 911." Great.

We took a chance and ordered anyway. And no emergency personnel showed up, so I guess it was a good move.

We kept driving until we got just about to Nashville, all the time trying to figure out what we were going to do once we got there. We kind of had a free day with nothing planned, and we couldn't really do that...so we passed a sign for The Hermitage. I had a co-worker tell me that we ought to go if we got the chance, so we pulled off (in the rain, so I wasn't so sure about this visit) and we drove to The Hermitage.

For those of you unfamiliar with The Hermitage, it was the home of Andrew Jackson. Its apparently about a thousand acres. There's a museum, the house - well, several houses, but the "mansion" has been restored to the way it looked when Andrew Jackson returned from his second term of office. There is an audio tour, which was kind of neat and a personal tour of the mansion by costumed guides. The wallpaper alone was pretty amazing.

It stopped raining while we were in the museum, so we walked around the grounds - the grounds are extensive and we really only saw a portion of them. There is a Spring House (where they got water for the entire community - having to carry it in buckets and such) and slave quarters.

We were going to go on the wagon tour, but the sign said the wagon left every 45 minutes, but we never saw a wagon at all. Guess it was our day to be rejected by historical places.

We had a nice time and it was a pretty neat look into a previous time, but we had to return to our time and get to our hotel.

I arranged our hotels on Hotwire. I was going to go through Orbitz, but I waited too late and the prices went up and I was able to find better prices on Hotwire. I looked for at least 3 star hotels and good user ratings. Last night it was the Best Western which was nice and tonight is the Sheraton Music City. The lobby of the Sheraton is impressive. The room is small, but nice and the price was definitely right. It's listed as a 3.5 star hotel -- I wonder if the lobby upped it the .5? It has a fountain.

Of course, we got in the very long line at the front desk - how many people could be checking in at 6 o'clock in Nashville? Apparently a lot, and I got in the shortest line - with all the people that had issues. I'm not sure what all the issues were, but man it took forever, but we finally got checked in and got a key and got to our room.

Apparently when you go from 3 to 3.5 stars, you think you can charge for internet. When I tried to sign on, it asked me for $9.95 for 24 hours of use of the internet. What? Well, I'm too cheap for that, so we decided to find something for dinner instead and worry about internet later.

We wanted steak and looked for steakhouses in Nashville, but we didn't want to change for a place that required reservations -- apparently there are quite a few places like that here based on the search on my phone. Maggie (the GPS) helped us out. She will tell you what's nearby, so we asked her and found an Outback. We figured we at least knew what to expect from an Outback and didn't from the local places, so off we went.

After a nice steak and a decision to go to McDonald's for internet access, we relied on the trusty Maggie to get us to the fast food place. She failed us. She took us in the wrong direction after telling us the McDonald's was less than a mile away, but she kept telling us to drive and then she turned us around about a block from ANOTHER McDonald's and we drove past the Outback to go to the first one we asked for. Now, I would say that it was user error except that she should have told us "to make a legal U turn" if we had ignored her. And she never did. She's possessed.

We got to the McDonald's - where I'm typing this right now - and park in front of doors that are positively WET with condensation -- we knew that it was going to be COLD. And we weren't disappointed. I'm sitting here in a warm hoodie and my hands are having a hard time typing because they are FROZEN!

And yes, we ordered ice cream.