We spent our first night with welcoming family in Huntsville, Alabama. Huntsville is an island of beauty in a state that gets a lot of negative publicity and we always enjoy our visits there. This time, we got a brief tour of downtown and into some really lovely, old neighborhoods. We walked around near the courthouse where there is a centuries-old spring that reportedly looks pretty much the same as it did in early photographs. It appeared fairly deep and there were large koi swimming around in the cool water. It has inspired the creation of a handsome and popular urban park that follows the stream as it flows from this spring.
On Sunday morning, we continued up I-65 to Nashville, where we stopped in a McDonald's for a cup of coffee. It was in an upscale area of office buildings and shops. The exterior was "fancy" with the half columns and other architectural details on the outside. On the inside, the employees were a mixed bunch that might benefit from going to "team building" workshops; the music that was playing loud was head-banging hard rock. I did mention that this was in the country music capital, didn't I? B and I both came out bewildered. It was the strangest McDonald's we were ever in.
We decided to check out the lodge at Barkley State Park in western Kentucky for our lunch. The park is located on one of the largest man-made lakes in the country. This picture is from their webpage.
The spacious dining room is called Windows on the Waters. I took these pictures from the deck outside the restaurant.
It was a good stop.
We made our way back to the interstate by use of The Trace, which is the road that runs the length of the Land Between the Lakes, a national recreation area of 170,000 acres wrapped by 300 miles of mostly-undeveloped shoreline. I have long been curious about the area, and perhaps it needed much more exploration to reveal itself, but it was pretty much a rural road through unspectacular woods. Oh, well: sometimes, you gotta go, to know.
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