Day 2: Rocky Top, Girl Scouts, nuclear bombs, and slot machines

Greetings from Metropolis, IL, the terminal destination for Day 2.  The second day of the great Westward Ho roadtrip began in suprisingly vibrant Knoxville, TN with a visit to the University of Tennessee's campus.  Highlights included seeing the inside of Neyland Stadium and being tempted to spend $51 on a pair of orange-and-white checkerboard overalls at the student book store.

The next stop was the Girl Scout museum in Knoxville, where Tanya was very eager to recreate each model's pose.  The museum also brought another Dolly Parton sighting, who, as you'll see below, is a lifetime honorary Girl Scout.  If you're wondering if this will be the last reference to Dolly Parton in the blog, it won't be.  This was Tennessee after all.  And if you're wondering if the museum sells girl scout cookies out of season, they don't.  My dreams of mid-July tagalongs were dashed.

 

 

 

 

After the museum, it was onto Oak Ridge, TN, the site of the secret city built in WWII responsible for processing the uranium ore used in the nuclear bombs.  The city includes the American Museum of Science and Energy, a really great museum that provides a nice pictoral history of the development of the city for the war effort and the secret work that was conducted within its confines.  The upper level of the museum features hands-on exhibits related to different types of energy sources and the modern uses of the nuclear technology developed during the war.  Admission was only $5 and they have a gift shop that features Albert Einstein bobbleheads and stuffed animals in the shape of diarrhea-causing organisms.  Definitely worth a stop if you're ever in the area.

 

As we left the museum at 4pm having only traveled 37 miles that day, it was apparent we weren't going to reach our planned destination of St. Louis (670 miles away) by the end of the day.  Our revised goal was to reach Nashville by dinner time to heed the recommendation of our friends Drew and Crystal to eat at the Wild Cow, a hidden gem of vegan restaurant tucked into a residential area of the city.  Unfortunately, as with many Southern restaurants, the operating hours were highly unusual (see Allen and Son's in Chapel Hill) such that they were closed on Tuesday evenings.  To spite the health food gods, we instead went to another Drew and Crystal recommendation, The Family Wash, where we each enjoyed a 4000-calorie shepherd's pie and a pint of local microbrew.

As we waddled back to the car, we decided that no trip to Nashville would be complete without a trip to the Grand Ole Opry.  Now, at this point, I had an idealized image in my head of the Opry being a grand ole building situated in a grand ole neighborhood.  Quite the opposite.  It's in a modern building siutated across the parking lot from a fricken mall.  After a night at the theater, you can walk across the street and play skee ball at Dave and Buster's.  And if that wasn't bad enough, the building itself, asTanya said, looks like steakhouse.  But we went in the gift shop anyway, played around with some Minnie Pearl masks, dodged hundreds of people who were at the theater to see Hootie and his newfound career as a country singer, and walked away with a magnet and some playing cards.

 

The evening was getting late, so we decided to head as far north out of Nashville as we could toward our next destination of St. Louis.  That's when Tanya pulled her trump card and booked us at a Harrah's on the Ohio riverfont in Metropolis.  What better way to wrap up the day than to rid myself of $10 in about four minutes at the Dolly Parton slot machines as I sat next to some Q-tips. 

 

 

 

Today's plan calls for a trip to the Superman museum here in Metropolis, followed by a trip up the arch in St. Louis (if I can overcome my claustrophobia and acrophobia), and a BBQ dinner in KC.

 

I fear the further north we go, the smaller the probability of references to Dolly Parton appearing in future posts.  Sorry in advance.