View from Roaring Fork Motor Nature Trail, on the way to Grotto Falls.

Week 2 started with the best part of the trip, Memphis! And it started off with a bang, at the best attraction we visited, Sun Studio! What a cool place, with a super cool tour guide. We learned so many interesting stories. After, we had a chocolate malt in the cafe area where the musicians used to do the same thing! Delicious!

Next we explored the Memphis Botanical Garden, which has a fun area for kids called My Big Back Yard. Here kids can run between different houses and become very inspired by all the imaginative things they see along the way. We spent hours there!

To top off an already great day, we experienced Jerry Lee Lewis Honky Tonk Cafe, on Beale Street! The lead singer of the band put on a real show and even lit the piano on fire! As we drove to our hotel, we saw the sun setting over the riverfront and it was a gorgeous sight.

The only downside of our time in Memphis was that we booked a hotel that was way out of town and this added two hours of driving to our day each day. What a waste! We were careful to check where our hotels were before booking after that- hotels might have the city in their name but not actually be close by.

Day 2 in Memphis we left early for Graceland. At first it seemed like it was going to be a terrible tourist trap but once we disembarked the bus at the house and entered with our self-guided audio tours, we were pretty happy with the attraction. It was very interesting to see the funky 70s decor in Elvis’ house, and amazing to see how many awards he won! The tour didn’t give us any new information about Elvis though.

We headed to a playground to get some running around time. Shelby Farms Playground has some amazing, modern contraptions but boy is it a hot place with not a puff of breeze.

For dinner we headed back to the Jerry Lee Lewis Honky Tonk Cafe for some more gumbo, and this time a Johnny Cash band. Great times! Best of all, we stopped at Beale Street Landing, a park and development on the riverfront, on the way home and watched the sun setting over the river. There was an amazing playground and a huge sloping grass roof you can sit on or kids can roll down. What an awesome place! I fell in love with this place.

The two days in Memphis were awesome, and now we headed to Nashville. We ate at the main street, Broadway, while listening to some live country music. In Nashville we visited a super place, Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage, the former president’s house on farmland outside the city. The audio tour was done so well, and you could even choose from three options at each station: regular, from his wife’s perspective, or for kids. The kid’s audio tour was fantastic and it kept my daughter happily occupied through the entire visit. We learned a lot and it was peaceful just walking around in our own world listening individually to our audio devices. We continued our long drive, staying overnight in the cutest spot under a pointed mountain, in a town called Kimball.

Now we were in the mountains! We visited some way touristy attractions: Ruby Falls, a huge underground waterfall that was pretty incredible, and Rock City, gardens with a view. After these our wallets were empty! Next we had lunch and walked around the lovely town of Chattanooga. What a cool development on the river, with a pedestrian bridge called Walnut Street Bridge where you can feel a great breeze high up over the river! We were so happy to be out of the heat and in the mountains! Although it would have been good, we were tired of attractions so we didn’t go to the Tennessee Aquarium or the Hunter Museum of Art, though I’d like to do that next time. Instead we went to the carousel at Coolidge Park and had dinner at the same place as lunch, on Market Street.

Because this part of the trip was not really planned in advance but was a last minute add-on I didn’t really have time to research the spots to go. Once home I realized that I missed a great bakery (always a bad thing to do!)- good bakeries in America are a rare thing, so I will have to go back for this. This one is in that lovely part of town I described earlier, where cliffs over the river make for great views, the Bluff View Art District. It’s called Bluff View Bakery.

The next day we visited University of Tennessee at Chattanooga bookstore for a fun browse and then headed on our way, to Knoxville. Knoxville has a very nice square called Market Square, with sidewalk cafes, a splash fountain, and statues. It was a great find for a lunch stop!

We continued our drive- the kids were real troopers- and arrived in Gatlinburg, a town at the entrance to Great Smoky Mountains National Park. What a weird surprise this was. Instead of finding a charming nature-filled get-away town, we found three towns (Pigeon Forge and Sevierville included) with the most gaudy stores and attractions- true tourist traps! Gatlinburg was the prettiest of the three at least, so we settled in for the night, eating a very patience-requiring dinner at Bubba Gump.

Oops I forgot the best part- one of the loveliest, nature-filled parts of the trip. In the afternoon, we did a hike to Grotto Falls in the national park! It was getting stormy and we didn’t know if we’d get stuck in a lightning storm but we had to continue on because my son had gone way ahead. I’m glad we did because it was beautiful. On the trail were flowers everywhere. We saw alpacas, returning from a delivery of supplies to the LeConte Lodge, which can only be reached by foot. Once at the falls, we stood behind them and it was exhilarating to see the sheet of clear water in front of us!

On the drive to Grotto Falls, I was happy to get a shot I’d been wanting to get for a long time: of the layers of blue mountains. And even with a bird in it!

The next day we drove through the park on the Newfound Gap Rd. What a beautiful drive! As you get higher the vegetation changes and you see spruce-fir trees like in Canada! It was a rainy day and mist filled the valleys, adding atmosphere. At Clingman’s Dome we couldn’t do the hike because of heavy rain and winds, but Ron ran up despite it! On the way out the park, we stopped at Mingus Mill, an interesting turbine mill on a beautiful stream, and Mountain Farm Museum, where trees with big leaves line the river and historic farm houses have been transported from other areas to this one spot.

We headed onward to Asheville, which is always voted one of the best places to live, so I was curious to see what it was like. It wasn’t actually that pretty, with some fairly ugly streets and architecture, and not many mountains views, but the people were interesting. They are a sort of hippy meets goth, with a ton of tattooes. The main street in town, Lexington, has some great restaurants, and we had a heavenly meal at Mela Indian Restaurant. Omg the mint sauce that came with the samosas- yum! We were really enjoying dining with huge windows open and fresh air blowing in. What a contrast after months of summer heat in Florida!

The next day we rose early to go to another touristy place, Biltmore Estate. This place was grossly overpriced, at $60 each. It is a gorgeous mansion though, in an adorable French style, with some small gardens filled with flowers. My daughter was not interested in the kid’s audio tour, however, and we were all getting a bit vacationed-out. We ate at Lexington Street again, this time not as lucky with our restaurant choice. Then we drove to Columbia SC. We were too tired to look around! So we ate at Chick-Fil-A (you really know you’re burned out from traveling when you do this!) and stayed in a roadside motel in a dreary part of town. The next day we headed to the main street, Gervais Street, near the university, but it was pretty dead on a Saturday morning. We ate at a Starbucks in a pretty historical building with a decorated ceiling. Then we drove to Savannah.

It’s hard to say whether Savannah is a place I like because by now we were exhausted. It is in a low-lying marshy area (not the prettiest) but the town itself is gorgeous with its famous squares. Every few blocks there is a square with a fountain, statues, and huge oak trees hung with Spanish moss. These squares were built for defense purposes originally. The architecture all around you is lovely, with ironwork staircases, balconies, and gates. We visited the square where Forrest Gump was filmed, when he says “Life is like a box of chocolates…”

It was hard to enjoy ourselves because the heat and stickiness was really out of this world, and hundreds of gnats were flying around us. Note to self- come in winter next time! There was a wonderful playground in Forsyth Park, but there were also lots of sketchy people there that harass you when you stop to look at the beautiful fountain. We ate lunch, which ended up giving two of us an upset stomach, and then headed on. Yikes we were glad to be in the AC once we reached our car.

Again, we stayed in a roadside hotel and ate fast food for dinner, in Jacksonville. First thing in the morning we ate at Dunkin Donuts and then drove straight home. We made it home by lunchtime on Sunday, and were satisfied to have completed our epic road trip! The south definitely has some great places to explore and I’m glad we had to opportunity to see it!