Nashville - Music City, new batteries for Big Red, and 1st time visit this summer to the Queen City - Cincinnati

We left Chattanooga on Sunday, July 3 for the Music City, Nashville.  After a quick stop south of Nashville to feed Big Red some fuel, we arrived in Nashville.  Not having made any campsite reservations we were hoping to find a spot at Prevost (maker of the Big Red chassis) service center just north of Nashville.  We lucked out and found a spot in their parking lot equipped with 50 amp electrical service.  Plans for our time in Nashville for 3 days were to celebrate Independence Day at the Riverfront Park, hit a few country honky-tonks on Broadway and attend the Grand Ole Opry.

Sunday night we drove to downtown Nashville to check out Riverfront Park for the next day and found a couple of honky-tonks.  We liked Legends Bar, because they had a group that performed a mix of old & new country tunes as well as a few 70's rock classics.

Monday we arrived at Riverfront Park by 2 p.m. for a long, hot day of music, celebration, and fireworks.  By evening the crowd count numbered 100,000.  This number was achieved with the normal viewing area across the Cumberland River at L P Field (home of the Tennessee Titans football) being closed for security reasons.  We enjoyed various music groups along with the headliners: Darius Rucker and Nashville Symphony Orchestra.  A discovery for us was a group called the Willis Clan.  A family of 12 home-schooled kids (with another on the way) who perform Irish music and dance.  They were wonderful.

Entertainer buses lined up at Riverfront Park

General Jackson on the Cumberland River at Riverfront Park

Stage on a barge on Cumberland River at Riverfront Park

Some of the 100,000 people attending.

Fire boat on the Cumberland River displaying red, white, & blue water streams

The entertainment was very good and the 25 minutes plus of fireworks accompanied by the orchestra was fantastic.  The sights and sounds from the fireworks were awesome.  You could feel your chest being compressed during some of the explosions.  Linda was in fireworks heaven!

We had tickets for the Grand Ole Opry for Tuesday night, so we decided to kill a few hours taking a tour of Nashville and surrounding area.  We saw many of the historic buildings and home of the stars.  Even saw Little Jimmy Dickens out on his driveway at his home.  Little Jimmy would perform later that night at the Opry and the crowd loved him.  It was a dreary, misting kind of day, so we didn't get any good pictures, but enjoyed the tour.

Nashville flooded in early May 2010 taking 13 inches of rain in less than two days.  The Opry was among many areas flooded.  The stage and other areas within the Opry house had to be rebuilt.  Pictures after the flood showed the waterline up to the door handles of the entry doors going into the opry.  The stage sits almost 1 floor below, so you can image the water on top of the stage, seating areas, dressing rooms, electrical equipment and so on.  What a mess it was, but it looked great over a year later during our visit.  The shopping center next door is still closed.  I don't know what is going to be done with it.

Big Red had been having trouble with recharging the house batteries that were over 4 years old, so  we stopped at a service center on Wednesday to have them and the chargers checked out.  Below are pictures from the job.

Old, blown up batteries. Yep, there are 8 of them!

All 8 old batteries showed this damage.

New heavy batteries installed and much lighter "wallet" for us.

After unloading our wallet for new batteries, we humbly drove to Cincinnati.  To make matters worse the outside lane on the last 60 miles of Interstate 71 south of Cincy was horribly bumpy.  Expansion joints were not even close together.  We thought we'd lose our dental fillings.  Luckily, we missed by 1 day the horrendous incoming traffic to the first ever NASCAR race of Kentucky held at a track just south of Cincy.  We heard thousands of people driving to the track on raceday never got there.  They were turned around by police to make way for outgoing traffic after the race.  What a mess!

We arrived at the Family Motor Coach Association campground for a complimentary night of camping.  They have a nice, quiet campground for members.

Tim by Big Red at F.M.C.A. campground

We were tired, rattled, and hungry, so we looked for somewhere to eat.  Tim needed a "fix" of Cincinnati chili and Linda saw a place she frequented as a teenager many nights growing up in Washington, D.C. area.

Tim gets his chili fix.

Linda ate many roast beef sandwiches in her teens at Roy Rogers restaurants.

And we topped off dinner with ice cream at:

Stuffed, we went to bed for our short drive on Thursday to Fort Loramie, Ohio and the 2011 Country Concert festival.  Read our future post.

Chattanooga and Cloudland Canyon State Park

Being concerned with having a campsite for the July 4th holiday weekend, we made reservations for a site at Best Holiday Trav-L-Park just south of Chattanooga for Friday, July 1 and Saturday, July 2.  Regretfully we left our campsite at DeSoto State Park.  We would have loved to stay there for many more days, but we needed to move north.  It was a relatively short drive, so we arrived early afternoon. 

Cloudland Canyon State Park in northwest Georgia lies just a few miles south, so we visited it in the afternoon.  Cloudland is a small park that lies on the western edge of Lookout Mountain that straddles a gorge cut into the mountain by a creek.  It has spectacular views into the canyon from an easily accessible east rim trail.

Look out below!

We drove around some of the roads in the park, eventually parking at the highest point, which featured a large radio antenna, lookout tower, disc golf course, tennis courts, & a large picnic shelter.  Parking just off the top, we took a nice, shaded 5 mile hike over nearly flat terrain.  Linda was a good sport and hung in there for the complete hike.  Driving back to Chattanooga we happened by a nice country restaurant.  After working hard during the hike, we settled down for a nice dinner.

On Saturday afternoon, we explored downtown Chattanooga.  Years ago we visited the new-then aquarium, so we decided to skip it.  We visited shops on the north and south sides of the river.  We saw some free, electric powered shuttles, so we hopped aboard.  The end of the shuttle line was the Chattanooga Choo-Choo Museum.  We spent some time touring the museum.

As we traveled back downtown on the shuttle, we noticed a bank electronic sign that read 100 degrees.  It was indeed hot and back to the RV park we went.  We cooked out that night after enduring a power outage at the RV park that lasted about 2 hours.  Good thing our RV is self contained.  We fired up the generator and ran the air conditioners until power was restored.  We cooked outside and prepared for a travel day to Nashville on Sunday.

Space City with Mansions and Tornado

On Thursday, June 30th we traveled from our campsite at DeSoto State Park to Huntsville, AL for a day trip.  Huntsville is known as the "Space City."  Our son, John, and his nephew, David, attended Space Camp there for about two weeks back in the early 1990's.  We thought it would be fun to visit again.  Linda loves all things N.A.S.A.  Addiction to the N.A.S.A. channel is Linda.  She watches all the shuttle launches and landings.  We've seen many launches live from the Cape as well as one landing.  Below are pictures (partial) of the Saturn V rocket.  It was too hard to fix it all in one frame.  The rocket is immense!

Of course the Saturn V was part of the Apollo program.  Remember "Houston, we have a problem".  Actor Tom Hanks will be forever remembered in his acting career for repeating that famous line.  Below are pictures of other space stuff.  The museum is full of fabulous exhibits with tons of information.

I wonder how this vehicle would tow behind the bus?

 Below is a picture of Tim in front of a famous Airstream trailer used for quarantining the crew.

After spending some of the morning and all afternoon at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, we decided to tour a district of historic homes and mansions of Huntsville.  The city was originally named Twickenham.  Eventually it was renamed after the town founder. Twickenham remains the name of one of the city's most famous historic districts with many homes and mansion being built prior to the Civil War.  Many of its buildings survived the war, because the Union occupied and used its buildings as a base of operations  Below are some of the pictures we took.

Huntsville contains the most dense concentration of antebellum homes in Alabama.  The homes represent the Federal and Greek Revival style among many others.  We would have loved to see the interiors!

From Huntsville we drove 30 miles southeast to Lake Guntersville State Park.  We had planned to stay at the campground, but heard it had been devastated by a tornado.  This campground used to have some tall beautiful trees.  The pictures below tell the story.  The campground was stripped.  Amazingly, no one was killed.  Many RVs were damaged or destroyed.  The lodge/hotel that sits on a bluff immediately above the campground only sustained minimal damage.  Mother nature has no rhyme or reason.

A few of trees and a battered restroom/bathhouse remain

We've already experienced living through a direct hit in our bus by a tornado and we don't want to again.  We drove back to our campsite in DeSoto State Park shaking our heads.