Into Kentucky for our first Waffle House in months - always worth a photo. Hey Waffle House, we were blue without you too!
We camped for two nights at Hillman Ferry in the Land Between the Lakes, beautiful area. So many trees and lots of water. There's a trail running most of the length of the National Rec Area, so of course it has an FKT posted for it. With an upcoming 100-miler I figured I probably shouldn't cover the entire 59 miles. But it would be nice to see some of it for future reference.
John offered to help crew so I could run as far as I felt like that day. Thank you John, you're the best!!
The start of the North-South Trail through LBL:
Occasional glimpses of Kentucky Lake to the west:
It's a well-designed and maintained trail, at least the northern section that I covered. Mountain bikes are allowed, and I'm starting to really appreciate all the work the cyclists put into the trails they ride.
There were so many fewer spiderwebs compared to my recent FKT run at Chief Illini Trail, it's hardly worth mentioning. The gathering of strands on my face eventually did get a bit old, making me think I should maybe plan these kinds of things when there are likely to be more (any) people on the trail.
Surprised to see little corn fields tucked in between the wooded areas:
John's aid station setup - why yes, I'll take a couple Dot's pretzels, thank you:
Usually I have to search a lot more to find one of these:
The day was quite warm, and while the tree cover helped a lot, I didn't feel the need to overdo anything. I made it to the visitor center/highway crossing at the halfway point and decided to do one more section. This part I enjoyed less - horses are allowed here instead of bikes, and horse people seem to care about different things in their trails. Sounds like a good place to call it a day (and an excellent training day it was). We'll be back for sure!
We continued our travels south to Nashville, which turned out to be a nice place to hang out for a week even though we did very little sightseeing there. Our campground had live music in the evening, which was great! One of these visits we'll actually get downtown to listen to music, but until then, music that came to us was a good substitute.
The next big event - a Rivian gathering! It was in Atlanta, which made us pause only briefly to consider whether we should drive all the way to it. Eventually we'll have an electric truck and we can worry less about our carbon footprint in the driving decisions (and more about charging station locations).
Speaking of electric trucks!
We would like one, please. It has enough power to tow our trailer, which will drop the range from 400 miles (non-towing spec) but hopefully will still be workable for our purposes.
And it has a gear tube :)
We had a great time at the preview, checking out the truck (and SUV across the hall), and most of all meeting designers and engineers that work for Rivian. They were all friendly, helpful, wonderful to talk to. We dug into lots of questions and ideas, and if one person didn't know the answer they referred us to someone else. We've never been a part of a pre-release of a product, and this was a really good one to experience.
And we got to meet the Rivian company founder, R.J. Scaringe! Super cool.
Since we were in Atlanta anyway, we decided to drop by a presidential library to learn about a former leader (one who is, happily, still alive!). A photo from his early days in the Navy, on his wedding day to Rosalynn Smith:
It's Jimmy Carter, in case you haven't figured that out yet :)
Fun to see some Hawaiian writing and leis:
Presidential campaign items:
Replica of the Oval Office:
We just saw this photo recently at the Gerald Ford museum, too funny!
Reading about everything Mr. and Mrs. Carter have done since being in office was so inspiring - working toward peace, fair elections, health campaigns and disease eradication, Habitat building, wow. So impressed and grateful.
And now for something completely different - the special exhibit was about movies and shows that were filmed in Georgia (and there have been a lot of them!). I believe these are actual items from the set of Stranger Things:
National Public Radio graffiti?
Not long later we were on our way back south, and anytime we get a chance to stop in at Aretha Frankenstein's in Chattanooga, you know we will. Best Pancakes Ever.
We were on our way back into Georgia for a 100-mile race. Stay tuned for the details on that one...
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