We've left Cincinnati and drove over to a little town in south central Indiana, N Vernon. This is normally corn country but not this year, they haven't had any rain in this area since early spring, we drove through miles and miles and miles of cornfields that were just dried up stalks and a lot of the farmers were already plowing the fields under.
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| We also made a little detour to locate a cemetery that was the location of where Cathy's ancestor (ROUKE) was captured, after walking the cemetery for about 45 minutes she finally found it. | |
Drove over to the town of Nashville which artist colony, tourist trap, craft center, give us your money type of town. If you've never been there it is quite an experience and a neat place to spend a few hours. We stopped at a sock store and found out that they have a factory about 10 miles out of town and have a tour everyday at 1pm, so we headed out that way and got there with a minute to spare. A single mom started the company "Barefoot Sock Company", when here son was diagnosed with brain cancer she quit her job as a teacher and started this company so that she could spend more time with her son. What started as a small business in their basement is now a large factory which employees around 500 and runs around the clock producing specialty sock (team logos, college's and anything else you can think of). Her son continued and finishes his last three years of high school and his first year of college before he died.
This also covered bridge country, we've never seen so many covered bridges that you can still drive across.
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Here's a very weird thing that we found out in the middle of nowhere.
Down to Mammoth Cave for a few days of exploring...NOT, right after registering with the camp office I started to pull across the street to the campground and the brake peddle went right to the floor. The seal in the master cylinder had blown, called a garage in town and they sent a mechanic out, he took everything apart and came back the next day with a new one (they had to overnight it) and installed it right there at the campground. It cost $300 but they didn't add any extra charge for coming out and doing it at the campground, so instead of exploring we just floated around in the hot tub for a couple of days.
Back roads across Kentucky and into Tennessee, after 500 hundred switchback turns, up and down 200 mountains you finally find the town of Pall Mall, home town of Sgt Alvin York, we stopped and walked around his old mill for awhile, after crossing the bridge I missed the turn for the visitors center and you can not turn a motor home that's pulling a car around on these back roads. I really wish I had seen it, Found out later that his son is the ranger at the Nation Historic Homestead located there.
 | Sgt. Alvin York National Historical Site |  |
We pulled into a club resort just south of Crossville, we're only
here for five days since what is there to do in Crossville, turns out that there is about two weeks of stuff to do here, guess we'll be coming back. Even with out getting any rain for the entire year the waterfalls were still pretty, one of the main ones that we went to last spring is bone dry with out any water going over it at all (Falling Creek Falls). The best one was Burgess Falls State Park, there is a trail along the rim of the canyon that takes you to three different falls, and then you can pick up the service road to walk back on. We also found a very pretty falls at Rock Island State Park.
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We drove over to Knoxville to go to McKay's Book Store, this is the biggest and best used book store we've ever found, besides there sister story in Chattanooga. We turned in our collection of books we accumulated over the last few months and got a $58.00 credit, we loaded up on a bunch of new books for our winter reading. Instead of taking I-40 back to Crossville we choice to take Hwy 70, more turns and more mountains, but we did find a nice scenic turn off with a great view of the valley.
A little ways farther down the road we found Ozone Falls, a short trail takes you back to the falls, which is a very small creek so there was hardly any water going over the falls. It has a 120 foot drop and would probably be beautiful during the spring with a full flow of water, rather then take the long long long, steep steep steep trail to the bottom (save that for a spring trip) I just crawled up to the edge and held the camera over the side to see how far down it was.
Baseball & Football today…more later.
