Looking to discover a restaurant no one else has found yet?

I have been to Memphis a number of times. It always left a good impression. But this time, I wanted out. Maybe it’s that our GPS led us to a road closed for construction and, no matter how hard we tried, it kept leading us back to the same place. Maybe because the counter sign in the hotel we selected around the corner from Beale Street said there would be loud music until 3 a.m. Maybe because the hotel we finally selected was next to a railway track where trains with warning horns passed at 3 and 6 a.m. Maybe because I felt I deserved a drink after my drive yesterday and I asked for a Ketel One on the rocks with a couple of olives, and I was told they had plenty of Ketel One, but were out of olives. Maybe a combination of all those things.

We started this morning with something special. You may not know this, but Edie has quite a bucket list. She wants to sky dive in Antarctica, explore the ruins of the Titanic from a bathysphere, and learn to speak fluent Swahili with a Nigerian accent. This morning, she was able to check one thing off her bucket list. For the very first time, she went into a Walmart! We were short of a few things needed for our trip and had to stop somewhere. Her excitement was without limit.

The rest of the day, including stopping at Pattie’s for lunch in Nowheresville, at an antique mall in Jackson, and at Loretta Lynn’s very own gift shop (next to her dude ranch) was filled with stuff no memories have ever been made of.

We drove through Nashville. Big city, no music on the highway, even though it is called the Music Highway. Go figure.

And, believe or not, we had no friends to visit and show you today. But, so as not to disappoint, I took pictures of some random people that look like people we could know. Here they are:

And then we arrived at Cookeville, home of Tennessee Tech and, according to Chat GPT, a city of approximately 200 restaurants. We had to choose one, and we chose The Putnam Room, across from the Putnam County Court House, upscale and just right. One of us had seared tuna, zuchini and sweet potatoes. The other had roasted chicken, asparagus, and mashed potatoes. We each had a Spanish sparkling wine. Our waitress, Emerson, maybe a student, did a fine job. I probably should have told her that “y’all” is not a word. But if I had, maybe she just would have substituted it with “like” or “I mean”, and all those things, I mean, are, like, contagious.

And that is it. Tomorrow morning, we plan to lose an hour and bet we won’t find it until our next trip to St. Louis in October, when one of us has, for the first and only time, a 65th high school reunion.

There will be two more of these posts, and then it’s back to bashing Drumpf.