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.

Our 40th anniversary and state parks

We drove from Eufaula to Gadsden, Alabama on Sunday, June 26th.  We got detoured because of road construction and somehow ended up driving through a ghost town, closed military base community.  It was like a switch was flipped one dayand the community was vacated including all homes, businesses, schools, and churches....very spooky.
Arriving late afternoon, we were just in time for a big storm at the RV park check-in.  Fortunately, the storm wasn't too bad, so we were escorted to our site after the storm blew over.  Below is a picture from our site.  The RV park, River Country,  is built on a peninsula into the Coosa River.

After getting settled at our site, we were hungry and after all it was our 40th wedding anniversary.  We inquired at the park office for recommendations.  The office manager said definitively, Catfish Top O' the River Seafood Restaurant.  Well, Linda doesn't like to look at a fish let alone it eat.  We called and were told they had a good steak, so we were off to dinner.

Dinner was great (even Linda's steak), so we enjoyed our 40th anniversary.  The next day we'd go exploring nearby state parks.

Cheaha sits in the foothills of the Appalachians with the highest point in Alabama at 2,407 feet.  We finally got some relief from the heat since we left Florida.  Spending the day on the mountain in somewhat cooler weather was welcomed.  The park has a lodge with hotel rooms and a swimming pool.  We enjoyed hiking around the top of the mountain.

 We also had a chance to visit a nearby water fall, Devil's Den after hiking along a stream.  Linda hiked part way, but decided to return to the trailhead to photograph things around the stream.  I pressed on to the falls where I found teenagers jumping off an overhang to the side of the falls  into the falls pool.

On Tuesday, the 28th we visited Little River National Preserve and nearby DeSoto State Park, which both lie north of Gadsden.  Little River runs along the top of Lookout Mountain, which is located just south of Chattanooga.  It is said the river is longest mountaintop river in the U.S.  Over eons the river has carved out a canyon along the top of Lookout Mountain.

Views from the canyon rim road, which runs along the western rim were spectacular.  In the fall with the changing colors of the leaves must be something to see.  Even at mid-summer we still enjoyed our tour.

We moved on to visit adjoining DeSoto State Park.  The entry to the park has a beautiful curvy road.

After visiting the park for the afternoon, we drove through the campground.  The state had just reburbed all the sites, facilities, and bath houses.  We inquired on site availability and found out that they had a great site for us for the next couple of days.  We decided to move from Gadsden to DeSoto.  Below is our site.

DeSoto has a lodge, swimming pool, country store, a fine campground, and miles of hiking trails along the Little River.  Tim took advantage of the hiking trails, while Linda shopped at a nearby farmer's market.

DeSoto Falls is located just north of DeSoto State Park.  Above is a picture of the upper falls.

The lower falls as pictured above has a much higher fall into a beautiful pool with high banks on each side.  The falls location was also the site of a minor skirmish during the Civil War.  Slightly upriver from the falls is an abandoned dam built for generating electric power for nearby towns built in 1925.  At the end of my hike I stumbled across the church below.  Why was it built connected to a huge rock?  Don't know.

DeSoto State Park is close to Lake Guntersville State Park and the space city of Huntsville, so we decided to visit them both the next day.

The "Grand Canyon" of Georgia and Eufaula, Alabama

From cousin Don & Pam's farm near Quincy, we made the short drive to Eufaula, Alabama on Friday, June 24th.  We had planned to stay at Lakepoint State Park on Lake Eufaula or also known as the Walter F. George Reservoir.  Not having made reservations, we hoped we could find a site.  We pulled into the main parking lot of the campground and were met with guys wearing bandanas, chains, & tattoos.  These were not normal state park employees.  One of the guys approached me as "brother" Jim from the Dothan chapter.  I didn't know what to make of him.  I soon discovered that the I.B.E.W. (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers) had reserved the whole campground of 192 sites for the whole weekend.  They were even staffing the park office.  After they identified me as a non-brother, they were no help on advice of an alternate campground in the area.  We moved on.

We looked on our maps and the internet to discover a Corps of Engineers campground on the same lake about 10 miles away.  We called their office and they said a couple sites were available that could handle our large rig.  Their office staff was very friendly and said they'd hold a site for us.  We arrived to find a wonderful campground with trees for shade and a short walk to the lake.

Campground site at White Oak Creek C.O.E. on Lake Eufaula

We made a day trip to The Grand Canyon of Geogia.....Providence Canyon State Park near Lumpkin.  I'll bet you did know this park existed. 
Visitors are often amazed when they visit “Georgia’s Little Grand Canyon.” The massive gullies, as deep as 150 feet, were caused by poor farming practices during the 1800s. Hikers who explore the deepest canyons will usually find a thin layer of water along the trail, indication of the water table below. Colorful wildflowers, as well as the pink, orange, red and purple hues of the soft canyon soil, make a beautiful natural painting at this unique park. The rare Plumleaf Azalea grows only in this region and blooms during July and August when most azaleas have lost their color.  We had a great afternoon hiking into the canyon and exploring the all its nooks and crannies.  The light was good, so we got some pretty pictures with lots of color.

Linda exploring in the canyon

 Eufaula was a very important center of commerce prior to the Civil War and was not destroyed during the war. Many antebellum homes and mansions are found there.  So we decided to visit the Shorter Mansion the next day.  The mansion was built in 1884 and remodeled extensively in the early 1900's.  Today the mansion contains many furnishings and articles from its heyday.

Our tour was led by the head of the local association that handles a pilgrimage of homes in the area every spring.  She was very interesting and gave much insight into the history and famous families of Eufaula.

On Sunday we drove to Gadsden, Alabama.  More on this area and a special occasion for Linda and Tim in the next post.

Visiting Cousin Don on the farm

Thursday, June 23 we had an easy drive from our overnight stay at Grand Lake RV & Golf Resort in Orange Lake to cousin Don Pumphrey and his wife, Pam's, farm near Quincy, Florida.  We arrived at the farm mid-afternoon before Don and Pam got off work, so we made ourselves at home.  We parked Big Red in front of the big red barn and plugged in.

Linda & Tim in front of Big Red in front of the big red barn

Don and Pam arrived at the farm after work.  We were only able to say hi to Pam and give her a hug, because she had to pack the van, pick up her daughter and grandkids to head to family reunion in Virginia.  We took a quick picture of all of us. Birthday girl, Pam, left, so we took Don to dinner in Quincy.

Pam & Don Pumphrey and Linda & Tim Tyler

 Before we left for dinner, cousin Don let the guinea fowl and chickens out for their afternoon stroll.  See below for what happened with the guinea fowl.  It was quite amusing.  My theory is the guineas saw themselves in the reflection from the stainless panels on the bus and didn't know what to think.  Maybe it was too much to handle for their "bird brains"!

 On Friday morning we said our goodbyes to cousin Don and headed for Eufaula, Alabama.  See our upcoming post on this interesting area.

We're off!

After quickly packing the coach, we left our house on Wednesday, June 22 at 5 p.m.  Just in time for rush hour traffic through Tampa.  We had planned to leave mid-day Thursday afternoon, but our plans got changed.  Our daughter, Maria, is pregnant.  She moved her appointment from Thursday afternoon to Monday afternoon for an ultrasound scan of the baby.  Of course the grandparents went along to get a look.  The experience was wonderful.  We could see a great outline, strong heartbeat, and legs kicking away....pretty cool.

Linda had hair and nails appointments on Wednesday she wanted to keep, so I brought the coach home on Wednesday morning while Linda held her appointments.  A woman has to get her stuff done.  We staged all our things in the house on Tuesday in preparation for leaving Wednesday.

Wednesday came and we loaded all the stuff we could.  Probably move stuff than we would ever need on our trip, but we got it and will haul it around for the next 2 months.

The picture shows the Linda holding Muffin and Tim holding Snoopers in front of the bus, Big Red, in our driveway just before leaving on Wednesday.  The cats don't look forward to traveling, but they adjust in a few days.

We drove through Tampa rush hour traffic, but it wasn't too bad.  We managed to drive to Orange Lake located between Ocala and Gainesville.  We arrived at Grand Lake RV & Golf resort just before dusk.  We don't like to park the bus in a RV park after dark.  All went well getting out of town.  Next stop is cousin Don & Pam Pumphrey's farm near Quincy, Florida.  More from there in our next post.