Tomorrow evening, we should be home. Tonight, we are 308 miles away in Wytheville VA, a 5 hour drive (with no stops – as if).

We had a nice dinner at the 1776 Log House, which is housed in a log house built in 1776. In 2021, it suffered a major fire, was closed for ten months and partially rebuilt. We have eaten here before one time, for lunch, but can’t remember why we were in Wytheville. Or when.

The building itself does look a bit frail.

And if you look at the various rooms down the alley, you may want to turn right around.

But the food is good. For example, they took a very nice piece of salmon, coated the top with a healthy layer of wasabi cream sauce, put crushed pecans on top of that, and decorated the entire thing with a zigzag balsamic drizzle. Believe it or not, it came out tasting just as well as if they served in plain with some lemon slices. Now that is culinary wizardry.

As you may recall, we started this morning in Cookeville TN, which is about 100 miles the other side of Knoxville. To break up our day before it even started, we decided to visit Oak Ridge, The Atomic City, located about 15 miles or so north of Knoxville, and decided to forego I-40 and take a Tennessee state road there instead. That road, Highway 62, goes through beautiful rolling farmland and up, down and around southern Appalaichan mountains. Much worth the extra half hour or so. I wish I could have taken more photos, but instead kept my hands on the wheel.

The most salient feature of the drive was the number of churches. You were hardly ever out of sight of at least one. You know the old saying (I paraphrase): If you can….do; if you can’t….preach.

When we reached Oak Ridge, we passed a house with a unique front lawn decoration:

Chacon a son gout.

Oak Ridge, you may be aware, was a secret town created in the wilds of rural Tennessee by the federal government starting in 1942 to provide a site to convert uranium ore into a fissionable material, with the goal of developing an atom bomb before the Nazis could.

The story of how a city of almost 85,000 could be built in a few years by the government, on a strict need to know basis, kept from the public, its budget hidden, and most of its staff of tens of thousands not even knowing the goals of their efforts, is a miraculous story. As is the story of Oak Ridge in the years following the end of the war.

And that story is told in several museums and many sites. We only had time to visit one museum, which tells the story of the town in accessible and detailed exhibits. We had no idea there was so much there. Clearly worth much more time.

From Knoxville, we got back on the Interstate and stayed there, getting off for a while only in the Cities of Bristol, where busy State Street marks the demarcation line between Bristol, Tennessee and Bristol, Virginia. This is another place that deserves more time, including the Birthplace of Country Music Museum.

Maybe one day, we will come back and see all this and more.