You win some, you lose some. That is the teaching of today.

The goal of the day was to get within 4 hours of Washington, so we would have an easy day tomorrow. We accomplished that, but at a cost of a lot of highway driving with no diversions.

Of course we did have to stop for lunch. I got off the road about 1 p.m. My watch said it was noon, because I hadn’t taken the half hour it takes me to move it forward an hour, as I needed to do when we crossed Crossville, not long before we skirted Knoxville. The last time we traveled this route, Edie and I stopped at Oak Ridge and saw a number of sites dedicated to “the bomb”. This time, we just kept going.

Diversion. To change my Casio watch, you push the A button and hold it until the word “set” stops flashing. Then you push the B button 2 times. Then you push the C button 13 times. Then you push the A button again. See why I waited?

Well, at 1 Eastern time, noon Casio time, we got off the road to venture into Morristown TN. The two blocks that comprise downtown are unique in that there are two levels of establishments, the upper level reached by an outdoor walkway that also protects the street level sidewalks from hot sun and wet droplets.

Brilliant.

They also have a mailbox in the middle of the street.

Seen that anywhere else?

And, finally, they have a restaurant, The Little Dutch Restaurant, which has been in business since 1939. The current owners are not the original owners, and appear not to have figured out how a restaurant should operate, as they have only run it since 1973. Edie asked for the spinach quiche, right there on the menu. The waitress said they were sold out of spinach. I said that I would just have a tuna salad sandwich, but the waitress returned to the table to tell me they were out of tuna salad, too. Say, what? What were they missing? A can of tuna, a jar of mayonnaise, a jar of relish? She said, “But we can give you chicken salad. How’s that?” Edie got a Greek salad (pardon me, a Grecian salad), which came with a slab of feta about the size of a deck of cards. My chicken salad came on a dainty croissant, which had not been cut and was totally impossible to pick up, or to cut with a standard knife. As we left, the owner asked me how everything was. I said “fine”. He did not believe me for a second.

We drove on until we reached Roanoke, which looked like Boomtown, USA. Much has changed since my last visit. And all for the better, it seemed. And it was a top notch place twenty years or so ago.

Unfortunately, not one hotel in or around the city had a room. I was told there was the Miss Virginia contest, the Blue Ridge marathon, a baseball game, and more.

So here we are, about 15 miles further north, in a Comfort Inn room half the size and twice the price as the one in Lebanon last night. Go figure.

And, yes, supper at Angelle’s Diner was just fine. As has been the weather and scenery all dsy