Exactly a week ago the Yankee Fan and I were cruising north on I-24, headed from Chattanooga to Nashville with a styrofoam cup of boiled peanuts in the cup-holder and country music on the radio.
We were in Tennessee for 10 days. Not for any particular reason. Just absorbing the low-key wonders of the Volunteer State. We ate too much pie, too many biscuits and sweet potato fries and deep-fried pickle chips and Waffle House waffles. We saw a hawk owl sleeping in a beech tree along the Appalachian Trail. We saw Andrew Jackson’s grave, a horse-powered sorghum mill and country superstar Alan Jackson being mobbed by women with big hair on the streets of Nashville. I acquired two new thermometer magnets for my collection. The Yankee Fan acquired some sexy new J. Crew outfits at the outlet mall in Pigeon Forge (birthplace of Dolly Parton and home to an apparently infinite number of pancake restaurants and miniature golf facilities). We didn’t get severly lost. We barely squabbled. We didn’t get sick of each other.
Basically it was one of the best trips I’ve been on, but when I try to tell people about what we did and why we went it sounds like boringness squared, or at least a strange locale on which to squander vacation days. Certainly the Tennesseans we met along the way, especially in small towns, were a little perplexed. Likewise, the security guard at the Nashville airport was a little perplexed when the threatening, liquid-filled mass in the Yankee Fan’s carry-on turned out to be boiled peanuts in canned form. I’m just glad I ended up with someone else who makes the Museum of Appalachia a high priority on his intinerary and thinks boiled peanuts are a good souvenir.
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