We took a road trip through the south to visit friends. You can see all the pictures here. We had a good time and really enjoyed meeting N.R. and his family and visiting with Ian and Ingrid and meeting their daughters.
We traveled 4500 miles and tried to stop for a lot of roadside attractions. I wish that we could have spent more time with N.R. and Ingrid, but two weeks was already a long time to be on the road.
Here are some of the highlights:
- The Capitol park in Nashville Tennessee has a history wall. The wall itself is pretty neat and has a lot of interesting history. But the best part is how they handled the civil war. The wall is about 4′ tall and runs the length of the park as a solid wall. But at the date when Tennessee left the union the wall breaks inward and curves around in a semi-circle.
>When the civil war ends and Tennessee rejoins the union, the broken section ends and the wall continues along the original straight path. - We climbed the world’s largest tree house in Crossville, TN. Named the minister’s tree house, it is built around a large white oak with seven other supporting trees. It is 100 feet tall and has about 10,000 square feet of indoor space. It includes a swing tied near the top, a bell tower and a working chapel. Along with the enormous size, the tree house is impressive because it is a maze of rooms and connections and so solidly constructed that you don’t realize you are above the treeline.
- Kitty Hawk. It was neat to see the flight museum and the field where the first powered flight took place. I hadn’t realized that the Wright brothers developed the wing and propeller shapes that was really the key to their success.
- The Angel Oak is a 400+ year old oak tree near Charleston South Carolina. It is truly enormous, providing 17,000 square feet of shade. We were there early in the morning and were almost the only ones there. We also saw a white squirrel!
We also visited the Magnolia Gardens in Charleston. The gardens are very pretty with oak and cypress trees with lots of spanish moss. - The Georgia Guidestones, sometimes called America’s Stonehenge, is a granite monument in the middle of nowhere that gives the ten guidelines for the age of reason. It may be the weirdest thing that we saw.
- In Atlanta we saw the Stone Mountain bas-relief (the largest in the world) and hiked up the mountain (a large quartz and granite dome).
We also visited the Coca-Cola museum where we got to sample many varieties of coke from around the world. - Ian Allen, one of the friends that we visited on this trip, has built a very impressive Battlestar Galactica board out of legos! The amount of work and thought that went into each part of this board is incredible and the results are great.
- In Little Rock we saw the Peabody hotel duck march. The tradition was started in 1932 in the Memphis Peabody. Every morning, the duck master marches five ducks from the rooftop to the lobby fountain where they stay till five when they are marched back. We also saw a very interesting park where a grist mill and two wooden bridges have been modeled in concrete. Mexican sculptor Dionicio Rodriquez created it with his faux bois (fake wood) style. The concrete wood was surprisingly realistic and there were many fine details.
