Joe's New Blog

Nothing special, this is just my third effort at writing a blog about my life and what goes on in it: Hobbies, cooking, work, maybe the occasional book or DVD review, and so forth. Nothing really noteworthy, but this is sort of a little subset of my world...

Saturday, March 21, 2009

End of the day's driving...

After our stop for lunch in Arkansas, we continued on through the flat eastern end of the state. We stopped at one little rest area on the way, hoping to find some of those pretty pink trees that we'd been passing on the way, so I could get a close-up picture of some of them, instead of the blurry shots from the car. Of course, there was a big patch of them on the side of the road about a quarter mile from the rest area, but all there was actually at the stop was one pathetic little specimen:

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Of course, they had some other trees planted around the place, including this one nice-looking pink tree, but it wasn't the same kind as the ones that I'd been trying to photograph:

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Overall, it was another nice little rest area out in a not-too-urbanized area, but it certainly wasn't anywhere near the quality of that first one we stopped at. We switched drivers at the rest area and continued driving through some rural areas of eastern Arkansas until we got near Memphis. We stopped in West Memphis both to get our bearings a little and for me to pick up a couple of Arkansas souvenirs. We initially stopped at a Cracker Barrel, but they didn't have anything to speak of. So we stopped at a little truck stop, and I got a couple of postcards and a shot glass with Arkansas stuff on them.

And then it was into Tennessee...

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Here's the Memphis skyline, a little blurry...

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And the Mississippi River, as we crossed it...

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The Pyramid...

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And the sign for Memphis, Home of the Blues and Birthplace of Rock 'n' Roll...

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In general, most of what we saw in Memphis wasn't all that great. It was kind of a squalid-looking little city from the freeway, with a lot of houses that looked like they could have been cute, but they just hadn't been kept up at all. I'm sure there are some nice parts to the town, but it's definitely not going to be all that high on the list of places we want to go back to. On the plus side, the traffic was still pretty light, even though we went through the city between about 4:30 and 5:00 local time. We figured it would be pretty high traffic, being near rush hour, but we really didn't have any problems getting through the city.

A little while after leaving town, I took this picture down the freeway...

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Traffic was like this most of the way between Memphis and Nashville, and the scenery was a lot like this, too. Just lots of leafless trees, and a lot of flat terrain. We stopped for gas and switched drivers after Memphis, and I took us most of the way to Nashville.

We stopped a little to the west of Nashville so we could figure out where a motel might be and so the girlfriend could drive us into town. They had a bunch of white flowering trees planted near the gas station where we pulled over:

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I'm not sure what these are. The flowers looked rather pretty, but they stunk quite a bit. Dogwood? I'm really not sure.

Anyway, we made our way into Nashville pretty easily, although we did get a bit lost in the downtown area. We saw the capital building from a bit of a distance, but I didn't get a chance to get a picture because I was trying to navigate us through town to our possible motels. We finally got here to the Knight's Inn, just across the river from the downtown area.

The motel seems like kind of a bare-bones sort of place, but I guess it's not too awful. Unfortunately, it sounds like there are a lot of loud people around, so we might not get all that great a night's sleep. I guess we'll find out, though. For now, the girlfriend is trying to find out where we're going to meet her friends for drinks or something of that nature. Guess I'd better get myself ready to head out on the town...

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