Nashville and Beyond

We are really in Jackson, MS, right now, but I haven't had the chance to post what I wrote while on the way here until now. So here it goes.

It's Sunday evening, June 21 and there are finally a few minutes to write down a few notes before we go to bed. We are in a little bed and breakfast cottage someplace on a hill in the south cental part of Tennessee. It is a long story how we got here but first I'll get you caught up since the last posting.

Stan finished the closet/pantry on Friday afternoon -- at least as far as he could. Rick and Kelly will have to paint it and then do the finish work. We went to a home meeting that night in Murphreesboro and got home very late due to the fact that someone decided to make I-40 into only one lane instead of 4!! But we eventally got back.

Saturday morning we took off a little time and went and saw the Opreyland Hotel. We walked around the huge "courtyard" which is actually all inside. It is beautifully landscaped and has a "river" waterfalls, shops and restaurants. Then the most important thing was a trip to Trader Joe's. It was the last one until we get to Albequerque so we had to stock up as much as we could. That evening we went out to dinner with Rick and Kelly to a BBQ place with lots of local color. (I will eventually get the pictures up.) It was great food. When we got back to the house Rick and Kelly played a concert for us on cello and violin while I made bread for Sunday dinner. Kelly has a beautiful, large kitchen so they set up their chairs and stands right there while I cooked. I never seem to get away from cooking baking or doing something in the kitchen!! I am not complaining. I start getting itchy fingers if I don't cook for a while.

We went to the Lord's Table meeting with the church in Nashville and afterward a number of the saints came over for dinner. There were 2 sisters from the church in New York City who had come to Nashville for a nurse practitioners' conference. One of them was the wife of the couple we had stayed with in NY last time we were there. I had baked all desserts for that wedding in her kitchen. Small world!!

After dinner, we finally got away at about 4:45 amidst much packing, hugging and picture taking. Our goal for the evening was to get to a bed and breakfast place just off the Natchez Trace Parkway. The Parkway is an old trail between Nashville and Natchez, MS -- about 450 miles-- that has been there for centuries. It started as an Indian trail for the Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians -- a very beautiful and scenic drive with a speed limit of 50 MPH.

This is where things got interesting. Somewhere along the way Stan realized that he had forgotten to print the directions to the Ridgetop B & B. But he thought he remembered enough to get us there...but guess what: he didn't. After driving back and forth on the road it was supposed to be on we tried calling. I called the number on Stan's phone I thought was it, but it was Deidre Dilg in Nashville. I was in the process of telling her how to access Stan's email when we drove out of range for the cell phone. We kept going in and out of range on a road we couldn't stop on. She kept trying to call but then the phone ran out of juice. I got my phone -- which had only one bar on it and was beeping to warn that we were going to run out of power any second. I was swaeating bullets. Eventually we got through to her and got the number and arrived about an hour later than we should have. We just hadn't driven far enough on the highway to see the sign!!

They gave us a cute little one room cabin. We had breakfast the next morning in our hosts' house. While we ate a delicious baked Frend toast breakfast we watched a racoon, a wild turkey and humming birds eat their breakfasts through a large picture window. Our hosts were very pleasant people (as all good B&B people are) and they gave us ice for our cooler and let us used their sattlelite internet service to check our e-mail.

We had a very leisurely drive down the "Old Trace" stopping from time to time at some of the verious points of interest. Things like a nature trail hike, Merriweather Lewis' gravesite (of Lewis and Clark fame), and a visitors' center. For lunch we stopped and picniced along the wide Tennessee River. The breezes off the water made the hot muggy day more bearable. The road is very nice -- hardly any traffic -- no trucks are alowedd -- beautiful and relaxing. Stan said it hardly feels like he was driving.

We are heading for Jackson, Mississippi, where dinner is waiting for us at Dale and Debbie Hoekema's.