Continued from Nashville.

We woke up to bad news that Hurricane Beryl had hit our beach house in Surfside Beach basically directly. We saw people posting photos of the destroyed A frames and imagined the worst for our house as well. We’ll have to wait for most photos to trickle in through the day to see what the damage is. What sucks is that we are hundreds of miles away and will continue to be away for another week and a half. Sigh. There’s no electricity on the island, so not like we can do much even if we could go there.

Breakfast always cheers people up, right? We got down here at close to 9 and made the last two waffles before they shut down the breakfast station.

We are too snooty to drink the drip coffee at the hotel. So we decided to walk to a near by coffee shop for our morning brew.

Fancy. This is located inside another hotel close to ours that’s obviously much nicer than our place.

My photo.

RL’s photo. She wins.

Found outside of the hotel where the coffee shop is located at.

The fuel that makes life possible.

RL had gotten the girls Taylor Swift dolls that she brought up from Austin after visiting the Country Music Hall of Fame museum. Both a blessing and a curse. It’s awesome that the girls love their dolls, but a curse when they start getting in trouble because they are playing house with the dolls too violently…

Still looking relatively clean.

Alright, let’s leave Nashville. Today will be a long, long driving day. I think close to 8 hours or so.

Kids are excited because…who knows.

Propane tanks?

We also saw Palestine, Alexandria, etc. etc. I wonder how all these towns got their names? Started by immigrants? Actually, just looked it up. It was a biblical reference.

Tennessee is a pretty state, Arkansas was not, at least not from the highway. Arkansas was green, but it was flat and without much variation. Again, at least from the highways that we drove.

From my trip over 10 years ago, I still remember strongly about parts of Tennessee that seems to be driving downhill forever. But then I looked at the altimeter in the car and it appears that we do go uphill sometimes as we never drop more than just a few hundred feet in elevation. I wonder if it’s harder for me to perceive uphill than downhill?

They love looking through the moonroof with the sun shade retracted back.

Doh, ran into traffic.

Reason for the traffic jam. Unfortunately, this slowdown added more time to our already long time in the car today.

Buccee’s bbq sandwich. Surprised to see a Buccee’s here.

Passing through Knoxville.

Now, we head towards Great Smokey Mountains.

Kudzu everywhere taking over everything.

Got our Apple Carplay hooked up to follow a preplanned route that I had saved.

Very pretty area.

And then all of a sudden, we came upon Pigeon Forge and we had no idea what to expect.

It’s like a mini second tier Vegas over here.

I had no idea Pigeon Forge is even a thing and people visit here as a vacation spot.

Got the kids some Star Wars themed Oreos and they are enjoying.

Out of Pigeon Forge and into the Smokey Mountains.

I know not the right mountain range, but RL wanted John Denver.

Lots of pullover areas.

Quite beautiful.

And after a fuel stop, our Carplay stopped working and had to resort to using the phone screen as a navigation. There was a glitch of some sort and we had a really difficult time getting Apple Carplay to show up on the car. Finally, took a reset of the infortainment system in the car to make it start working again.

Tunnel! It’s been so long since I’ve driven through a tunnel.

 
To be continued at Asheville Part 2.