Chattanooga to Shenandoah (Dec. 10-11)
We pulled out of Chattanooga and headed for the hills. We have been rolling through the Smokies and other branches of the Appalachians, past Davy Crockett Birthplace State Park and Knoxville.
I took a brief excursion to Wikipedia to read about Davy Crockett. He was a frontier hero of his time “King of the Wild Frontier”, made even more legendary in my childhood by a Disney series about his life. The theme song for the series started “Born on a mountain top in Tennessee…” Actually, when he was born the mountain top was in Georgia, but a change of the state boundary put it into the current state of Tennessee. He was never really educated, and was several times indentured to various tradesmen to pay off his father’s debts. However, he made it out of poverty to become Tennessee’s representative in Congress. He was quite a liberal for his time, voting against the Indian Removal Act (which started the Trail of Tears and which passed by only a single vote) and for many bills which helped poor farmers in Tennessee. However, the Indian Removal Act was popular among Tennessee voters, and he narrowly lost the following election. Disgruntled, he moved to Texas, which was then the frontier, planning to move his family out once he was settled. However, he lost his life in the Battle of the Alamo, along with equally famous frontiersman Jim Bowie of Bowie knife fame (and the entire garrison, whose names undoubtedly known, but not to me).
We also passed through Austinville, the birth place of Stephen Austin, after whom Austin TX is named.
One of the fun things in this trip has been visiting places that I know from history class, movies and TV. (Growing up in Canada, we mostly watched American TV and I was very fond of Disney films and cowboy series like Roy Rogers and the Lone Ranger.)
We spent the night in a pretty little campground in the hills outside of Kingsport TN. A sprinkling of snow on the ground indicated that it had never really warmed up during the day, but the evening was about the same temperature as Chattanooga. There were lots of birds – we are back to robin country.
On Monday we continued through the mountains to the Shenandoah Valley, driving along the valley floor west of the the Blue Ridge Parkway. The scenery and the weather look very much like home.
We pulled into a very small campground near the Shenandoah Cavern. It is quite empty, and I cannot wonder how it can pay them to keep it open during the winter. However, we are glad they have.
We decided to go out to dinner, and ended up at a strip mall pizza joint with surprisingly good Italian food. I think I mentioned before that there are a lot of good restaurants now in unexpected places.