Cookesville, TN

We arrived yesterday afternoon in the beautiful city of Charlotte, NC, which appears to be the banking capital of the universe. The AAA guide says that there are 9 major banks headquartered there. It's a lovely, new city, with neighborhoods full of little mansions, and lots of flowering trees.

We spent the afternoon at the JCC with my friend from college and her baby daughter. What a nice pool--with a big Jewish star painted on the bottom (funny!). It also had a playground full of splashing sprinklers and knobs to turn to make water come out, and Evan was walking around with a purple bucket on his head for a helmet, making the water spray everywhere.

My friend and her husband grilled us a great dinner and then hosted us overnight in their lovely home; then, this morning, we got to visit Imaginon, Charlotte's absolutely beautiful children's library/theater. I would be at that place every week if I lived in Charlotte.

After we left Imaginon, we headed toward Tennessee, and pretty soon I was forced to take the wheel for Mike's involuntary nap. There followed several hours of the windiest, greenest, granite-iest interstate that I have had the pleasure to traverse. It's only a two-lane highway through the Smoky Mountains. It was pretty exciting to drive it, plus we were listening to Obama's tele-press-conference on the XM Radio, so that made it even more interesting. :)

We finally emerged onto the flatter plains of Eastern Tennessee, and let our geek flags fly with a visit to the American Museum of Science and Industry at Oak Ridge, just above Knoxville. This was of course, like Los Alamos, a WWII "secret city," but this one was for the enrichment of the uranium that was used in the second atomic bomb. They had a great display all about the building and operation of Oak Ridge, and then they also had a little boxlike house that you could walk through, all kitted out like a 1940s house, just the same as the houses in which the Oak Ridge workers had to live.

When we finally left Knoxville, it was battering down, so we had to re-evaluate our plan to press on to Nashville. Cookesville, TN is a city with a very cute, old-fashioned downtown where we have stopped for tonight. Tomorrow we press on to Memphis and the obligatory cheese-fest that is Graceland.