Cruisin'

What a weekend we had! I love summer vacations – can’t live without them. But something I love almost as much is the occasional springtime mini-vaca. Josh and I were invited by friends of ours from work to spend a couple nights in Knoxville/Gatlinburg, TN. They have a Corvette and we have a GTO, so we planned to go cruisin’. Naturally, we jumped at the chance. It’s always nice to move out of the “normal routine” for a few days and shake things up a bit. We had an absolute blast. 

First, we stopped in Knoxville to catch a Third Day, Tenth Avenue North concert. It was so much fun and so encouraging! Loved the live music. Excellent. (Perhaps I will share one of my FAVORITE Tenth Avenue North songs with you for Fave Song Friday.)

While we were in Knoxville we ate at Ye Ole Steak House. It was delicious, and I could kick myself for not taking a picture of our steaks. WOW. You’ve never seen steaks so big. Seriously. And they had the best sweet tea I’ve probably ever tasted, second only to my momma’s. Check them out sometime if you’re down that way. (Or UP that way, depending on which direction you’re traveling from.)

After a nice stay in the Hampton Inn, downtown Knoxville, we drove to US 129 a.k.a The Tail of the Dragon. If you’ve never heard of this road, Google it. It is 300-some curves in like 11 miles. CRAZY. I thought for sure I’d get car sick, but thank goodness I didn’t. I got some video, which I will try to post maybe later, but it doesn’t even begin to show the curviness…also, a cop got behind us, but it was still fun. LOL

Once we made it through the Dragon, we stopped at a motorcycle resort/restaurant to check out the “Tree of Shame.” Basically, it’s a tree with hundreds and hundreds of pieces of scrap from motorcycles that have wrecked while navigating the Dragon. Kinda sad; kinda funny, too. 

Tree of Shame

Josh says he wants to take his Buell next time. Yikes! (A Buell is a sport bike made by Harley for those of you who, like me, know nothing about motorcycles) p.s. I bought my first Harley Davidson shirt on the trip. Does this make me a biker chick? Nah. Gotta ride first, and my hubby wants to master the art before he lets me on the back, which I greatly appreciate. After that, I will be the classiest biker chick you’ve ever seen.

We headed down to Gatlinburg after that – did a little shopping and ate at a fantastic Italian restaurant. I believe it was called Best Italian. It lived up to the name, for sure. That night, we had every intention of driving up to Pigeon Forge to ride go-karts. We hopped in the GTO and headed that way, only to be stopped in traffic and make it to Pigeon Forge 4 hours later. YES – 4 HOURS LATER. If you’ve ever been to the area, you know it is approximately 5 miles between Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge.  Needless to say, we had to make our own fun. We laughed ‘til we cried. It was aggravating to say the least, but we did have fun getting to know each other better away from work. No go-karts that night after all. Maybe next time! Later we found out the traffic was due to a hot rod show they were having in Pigeon Forge. Can you believe it? Craziness…

We had a nice drive back home to good ol’ WV on Sunday morning. Got home, washed cars, mowed grass and made it to church for the evening service! Great way to end a fantastic weekend.