This will be the last travel entry for a while as we are stopping at our daughters house for a couple of weeks. During that time, I will post a final entry summing up this trip. Thanks for reading.
Last night we were in Cave City, KY, just outside of Mammoth Cave National Park. We were up early and on the road at 8 AM and 67 degrees. We were headed for Asheville, NC and decided we would take the scenic roads most of the way. We drove through A LOT of small towns including places like Summer Shade, Marrow Bone, Waterview, Burkesville, Twin Lakes, Albany, Monticello, Frazer, Bronston, Pine Knot, and Strunk, all in Kentucky and then through Rocky Top and Knoxville in Tennessee.
Most of these small towns have a lot This is middle America where many people have their own small businesses. The center of town may not even have a gas station, but along the main road are posted signs in front of modest buildings or private homes identifying them as one sort of business or another. Some are craftsmen working with wood or metal. Others are selling something. As matter
of fact, today, on a Thursday, we saw A LOT of lawn sales. I had to chuckle a bit because it was clear that most were ongoing businesses, not your typical lawn or garage sale that people have occasionally. We saw some lawns with so much stuff for sale, it was obvious it was never going to all fit in their modest little houses. Mom and grandma would be sitting in the yard, sometimes rocking in a chair and chatting, as cars just drove by. It was a nice day for it, I have to admit.
The many farms that we saw were family farms growing corn and soy beans, dry and about ready to harvest and in some cases, the crops had already been cut and towed away. The farmland was dotted here and there with old barns that were falling or ready to fall into themselves after having been abandoned for years, barn boards just waiting for someone to put them through planers and give them another life as something else.
Tyson has a huge presence here in the Albany area as well as Kingsford in the Summer Shade area, that makes charcoal. Clearly
After passing through town after town of modest homes, some singlewides, some nicely cared for with freshly mowed lawns, others old and needing attention, we drove through Frazer where called Fox Chase is the home of many large houses, beautiful new houses, sitting up above the road waiting for their newly planted landscaping to mature and grow around them.
Near Frazier, we stopped by the boat launch at a marina on the Cumberland River. There were many boats docked in the slips and a large number of them were houseboats. As we ate our lunch, we watched as a backhoe loaded a large piece of cement onto a pontoon raft and pushed it out into the water. See photos. That cement put the end of that raft right down into the water and the men on the raft pushed it away with their little boat to who knows where.
When we decided it was time to head for a real highway and make some time toward Asheville, the GPS in our car sent us on another goose chase onto a small winding road, then another, then on
a dirt road and onto a single lane dirt road in the middle of nowhere. So we turned around and backtracked a bit and put Google Mapes on my into Apple Car Play and got us on a much more reasonably route. It took us to Ashville half an hour sooner than the car GPS had promised to do.
