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Published: March 14th 2017
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View from the Front Door Marion County Park, Jasper, TN
What do you get when you mix green dots with a lot of water? Give up? Well mostly just a gray smear.
That's what happened to our Green Dot traveling day yesterday. We had hoped for a pleasant journey through the rolling green hills of southern Tennessee, but weather intervened. It was overcast the entire day which tends to mute the colors anyway. But it wasn't raining at the beginning of the day and up until lunch we did enjoy the drive through big and small estates and farms. One thing I remember about the east, that isn't true in the west, is that people live everywhere. In Wyoming or New Mexico, even parts of Colorado, you can drive for an hour or more and not see any sign of another human being. That's just not possible out here - isolated little villages seem to be every ten miles apart. And scattered in-between them are homes, and a few business, just right there next to the highway.
On a bigger scale, you can see the pattern on a map. Western states tend to have just one, or at most two, large metropolitan centers
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Still Overcast which become the commercial and political hub for the entire state. Think Albuquerque in New Mexico or Denver in Colorado. Compare that to Tennessee, for example, which has Memphis, Nashville, and Chattanooga locking down different corners of the state. None of those are truly huge cities, but they are big enough to serve as economic and political centers. And probably makes for interesting local politics as well.
We stopped for lunch at the highly-rated Brass Lantern in Lawrenceburg (TN). They highly recommended their Black Angus steaks and since we hadn't had a steak dinner in quite some time, we opted for the full thing - steak, baked potato, and salad bar - for lunch. Steak was very tender and cooked perfectly, medium-rare for us. I ordered the Orleans Cajun version, which came served with a spicy butter sauce (arteries closing yet?). Food was really very good, service not so much. And, needless to say, we didn't need dinner again.
We emerged out of the restaurant into pounding rain which, unfortunately, didn't let up for the rest of the day. Rain does two things to a road trip. First, it, literally, washes out all the color in the surrounding
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Another Direction landscape. Everything turns to different shades of gray. You could tell that the trees were budding new leaves and flowers, but there was nothing vibrant about them. And, as we moved up into what I am assuming are the southern ends of the Appalachian mountains, you could tell from the road cuts through the ridges that there were thick layers of sedimentary rock, but making out any details just wasn't possible. Thick clouds and pelting rain don't help the view much either.
The other thing rain does is distract you. Although my five-ton rig is fairly well planted on the road, it is still effected by passing trucks and wind gusts. The threat of hydro-planing is always there forcing me to pay attention more to what's in front of me, instead of what's passing by on the side. I'm sure there was lots to see on our green-dot route yesterday, but I didn't see a whole lot of it.
But we did make our destination, 240 miles later. We are staying at Marion County Park, here on an island in the middle of a lake. Jasper is a short drive north of Chattanooga. We arrived with it still
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That's Our Rig raining cats and dogs. And I will tell you that no-one likes unhitching and setting up camp in the rain. The dogs don't even like it. But Joan was a real trooper, telling me repeatedly how much fun she was having. So much fun, in fact, that she's thinking that maybe camping has reached its pinnacle and there is no point to doing this camping stuff much longer...
I'll get out and take a few pictures here in a moment and upload them with this post. We will be here a few days as there are a couple of things we want to see nearby. And we are a little tired from all the traveling.
So today is a down-day! (17.1.6)
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mickey
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Arteries
I wouldn't live through that steak dinner! and wet...but green. Joan, you're funny...no more camping? Such fun. M