Friday we got packed and got going, but not much else happened. Well, except the fact that we all agreed we loved Orlando and were coming back next year and staying longer. Technically, the kids and I agreed. Hubby agreed he’d had a good time, but was less enthused about the “coming right back next year” part.
Saturday we were going to do the Tellus museum in Cartersville, Georgia and maybe something in Nashville, then Sunday we were going to do Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. The kids and I watched Ken Burns’ series on the National Parks, and, for all the moaning and groaning I got during it, it ended up having a fair impression on the troops, and Warrior Girl, especially, wanted to hit a National Park, and since we were driving right by one, why not?
I could
not stay on focus for this post, so I finally just let myself wander off and made note when I got back to the trip.
NASHVILLE RAMBLING...
Nashville is one of our favorite cities. My parents moved to Tennessee shortly after Mr. Cool was born – they came to his baptism service, then headed out to Tennessee after church. My sister was living in Chicago back then, and she decided to run my two eldest and I down to see the parents that winter. We stopped at the Grand Old Opry Hotel, and walked through some of the atriums – well, the Hermit, my sister and I walked; Mr. Cool was still a babe in my arms. We didn’t see all the atriums, but the one we did walk through was lush and green and warm and wonderful. The Hermit was initially a bit wary of a waterfall over one of the pathways, then she decided that was cooler than cool. (These are someone else’s pics.)
From here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ambrosia_apples/431106002/in/photostream/
Since then we’ve stopped in Nashville many a time, although we haven’t done a whole lot there except drive around, eat, and point out pretty rocks and views and stuff. We did do Cheekwood Gardens when they had a dinosaur exhibit – I loved the gardens and art part, the kids liked the dinosaurs – and for a while we did the Parthenon and its surrounding park just about every time, because we did that one of the first times and certain of my children were Stern Traditionalists when young (i.e., if you did it once, you are obligated to do it every time
).
The Parthenon is a reproduction of the original in its prime; on the lower levels are a gift shop and art galleries and then upstairs they’ve got a statue of Athena based on the original, along with casts of statuary from the pediments. Greece may have the real thing, but the Parthenon in Nashville is intact.
To give some perspective on the size of this statue of Athena: Nike, the goddess of Victory, who is standing in Athena’s hand, is six feet, four inches tall. It’s not surprising that Athena intimidated some of my chillins some years!
Not crazy about hubby's pic there, but then again, that’s not my favorite statue of Athena. While historians have a good idea of what the Parthenon looked like, all we know about the original statue of Athena is from written descriptions, so this is the artist’s best guess of what the original really looked like. I think he took the ancient critics too literally in making her so made up, but whatever. I do appreciate the artist's attention to details, for instance his work on the shield.
Athena was the goddess of wisdom; since owls were also associated with wisdom, Athena was associated with owls, but I am guessing it’s specifically the owl Glaucus in that painting.
All of which is hopelessly off topic, but we do love Nashville and hope to get back soon. If everything works out well with hubby finding a new job and all, Nashville and Mammoth Cave will be our second 2013 trip.
BACK TO TRIP
Anyhow, I can’t remember exactly where we stopped Friday night, but it was a Quality Inn and Suites somewhere between Atlanta and Cartersville, maybe Marietta.
Saturday morning, we hit the Tellus Museum in Cartersville, which is right off the highway, and, if you’ve got an ASTC membership, it’s free! It’s pretty reasonable otherwise, IIRC. It’s bigger than you’d think, being as how it’s kind of the middle of nowhere, with a small collection of dinosaur fossil stuff, and a big, beautiful collection of rocks. Including lots of pretty, sparkly rocks, like this one:
from here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/alan_cressler/3265064957/in/photostream/
The guy who took that has a fair number of Tellus pics, mostly the fossil stuff and rocks, but he didn’t take pics of the whole museum. There are some displays in the middle there we really didn’t get to. Well, okay, that the Hermit and I didn't get to -- we spent about twice as long looking at pretty rocks as everyone else did. The photographer also didn’t take pictures of the parts my kids probably liked best, going on their joy once the Hermit and I caught up to them; a couple of rooms in the back where you can dig for fossils or pan for gems, and then take home what you find. It’s the only elevated fossil dig we’ve run across, and of course my back loved that part. I like to dig them up, but I don’t take any (although the kids sometimes raid my stash if I run across something particularly cool). So that was a nice morning break.
It was a little rainy at Tellus, but as we drove through Tennessee the rain got steadier and heavier – by the time we passed Murfreesboro, much, MUCH heavier. We have a bad habit of listening to discs and tapes and Ipods on the road, when sometimes we maybe should be checking in with the local radio stations. This was one of those times we should have been a tad more tuned in to the local news. As we approached Nashville, the traffic rapidly changed from heavy to horrific to stop-and-go to Just Plain Stopped. The only traffic moving was people working their way through to the shoulder and then down to the next exit to get off the highway.
We decided to join those taking the next exit, but of course we were a few lanes over, so it was still a long while working our way across. But we finally got to an exit – we got off on exit 60: Hickory Hollow Road, which parallels the highway and bit and then you hit Bell Road.. And this is what was happening on the highway at Bell Road:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5gYhLKwSp4
MORE RAMBLING...
The beginning of that clip was on the national news, but this one also shows a floating car cut the side of that building and the building kind of folds into itself, which wasn’t shown much but is kind of cool in a depressing sort of way. However, even when that footage was shown on TV, what no one ever mentioned is that the building got creamed on Saturday afternoon, then
it kept raining. It rained pretty much the rest of Saturday and then, off and on, most of Saturday night, and it was still sprinkling off and on for most of Sunday. And it rained above Nashville – there were areas that didn’t get flooded until Monday, after the rain was over. I think flooding with sunshine is in some ways more eerie than flooding in a rainstorm – feels more unnatural, and yet more inevitable.
Nashville didn’t get the worst of it -- the Cumberland River was 62.58 feet high at Clarkesville; at Nashville it “only” reached 51.86 feet.
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/ohx/?n=may2010epicfloodevent
I call it the Nashville Flood because that’s where we were, but really it was a huge event – 48 Tennessee counties were declared disaster areas on a Federal level. If anything, the western part of Tennessee got it worse, because it’s lower and flatter. Nashville is hilly, and a lot of the housing is built up in the hills. Here’s some aerial footage of the Dyersburg area, which is about a three hours drive west of Nashville:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBr297p-5Vk&feature=related
Even in local news, you mostly heard about Nashville and the Interstates being closed. Few people realized that chunks of I-40 were down due to flooding from Nashville all the way to the state border at Memphis, over 200 miles, and a bit of Mississippi got socked as well. Memphis had flooded streets, and a levee broke, flooding Millington Naval Base, but admittedly the flooding in Memphis wasn’t as extensive as it was in Nashville. There’s also the fact that no one filmed anything as visually interesting as a temporary school room floating down the road, so Memphis got ignored along with the rest of Tennessee.
So even in Nashville, where there was a fair bit of coverage, initially the locals still didn’t realize how big an area was affected – this guy in Nashville went out that Sunday thinking he wouldn’t see much flooding:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mob7y7BuIHo&feature=related
Admittedly it's not too bad where he was, but although I-24 got the most press, I'm pretty sure that wasn't the worst of it in Nashville, either. I'm linking to these pictures because they showed up so huge when I posted them here. But in this one, see that little pyramid to the right, just barely above the water?
http://www.tennessee.gov/tsla/exhibits/disasters/images/flood of 2010/05042010_flood_05.jpg
That’s the top of this rain gauge (which, as you can see here, measures floods up to 50 feet):
http://www.tennessee.gov/tsla/exhibits/disasters/images/flood of 2010/05112010_flood_10.jpg
And here’s a long shot (the flood gauge is in front of the stairs):
http://www.tennessee.gov/tsla/exhibits/disasters/images/flood of 2010/05112010_flood_06.jpg
(All from this page
http://www.tennessee.gov/tsla/exhibits/disasters/floods2.htm)
The first picture was taken on Tuesday, May 4, the second two on May 11 – we were driving through on Saturday May 1. So after more than a week, the water was still 20 feet above flood level. Nashville got pretty clobbered.
BACK TO OUR STORY...
Once we got off the highway, we still didn’t realize what we’d stumbled into, and the route I’m going to report looks right but we weren’t paying a whole lot of attention at the time, so who knows?
We couldn’t get much of anywhere on Bell Road (cops had it blocked off in both directions), and ended up taking this tiny two-lane off into nowhere. We thought we were making progress because, although it was more stop than go, someone would come along from the other direction once in a while, and we figured that meant people could get through. Especially since there were semis coming through – no way could they be turning around, therefore they had to be coming from the other side, right?
In reality there was a cop blocking the way and sending people back; what made the process so slow that you only had a trickle getting through was that the road was so narrow; two lanes and no shoulders to speak of. Even with our little minivan, we had to work it around in stages. We never did figure out how they got the semis turned around; our best guess is the cop made people behind the semi turn around and get out of the way until the semi could back into a driveway or something. Sooo, we were back on Bell Road after another agonizingly long time in a row of cars going nowhere. Since we couldn’t go anywhere on Bell Road, we took Hickory Hollow back onto I-24, backtracking to the last exit. Everyone was turning left (I’m guessing their GPSs were heading them over to Murfreesboro Pike, which wasn’t going to get them anywhere I suspect but they – and we – didn’t know that at the time), however we’d had it with following the crowd and went right.
Which didn’t do us a whole lot of good, since we soon hit a good wad of traffic again and, after a while, realized the road was also dipping down. Which, we’d figured out by now, meant the odds were good it was flooded. Argh! But, surprisingly enough, when we got to the light at the bottom the road was fairly clear, and we went left on Nolansville Road, I think on the theory that if we could get out of the Nashville area it’d be easier to cut across to 65. If I remember rightly, this is where we saw lots of cars and trucks that had been abandoned – you had to drive around them to get through.
The road was intermittently under water, and it was very flooded to the right of it, with houses that were clearly done in and things. Those of us with out-of-state license places proceeded very cautiously; Tennesseans would often pass us and plow through a puddle that covered the road, letting us know how deep it really was. Sometimes we followed them, but at one point we were debating it, one of us thinking that area was just plain too deep and too huge and the other exasperated enough at that point to just go for it. And I honestly can’t remember which one was me!
We’d barely started the debate when a cop car passed us and pulled across the road, so that decision was made for us, and we turned around and headed back. When we got back to where we’d entered Nolansville Road we just kept going, since we didn’t want to join the people presumably still getting forced out of the Bell road area (there were still tons of people wandering around back there hoping to find a better way when we’d decided to backtrack on the highway).
Going northwest the road started to rise again, and now we could see unmistakable evidence that the water had been much higher earlier. Since it had continued to rain pretty steadily the whole time we’d been in the area, either someone had opened a dam or something downstream had given way, because you could tell by the debris washed up on side roads or driveways that the water had been considerably higher earlier on, a couple of feet I would think (although it can be hard to guess that sort of thing with a slow and gradual rise). The traffic here was much lighter, and we’d been stuck in traffic for something like four hours at this point (and the amount of ground we’d covered was pitiful), so we stopped at Taco Bell for a late dinner.
It was kind of busy for that late hour but not horribly busy, and a fair percentage of the people there were locals, so hubby got to talking to them and they worked out what would be the best route for us to take and told us how to get onto I-65 on high ground where it was likely high enough we could keep going, and we did exactly that. Our philosophy is that, if we’re not going to hang around and help, our job is to get out of the way. We didn’t even try to get rooms in the Nashville area; we just drove up to Bowling Green, KY and crashed.
Not surprisingly, we didn’t get going at all early the next day, and no one but Warrior Girl was at all interested in going to Mammoth Cave National Park. Plus, it was still raining – the main appeal may be the cave, but it’s a pretty park up top. Geek Dad gave in and said we were definitely going back to Orlando next year, and that we’d budget a trip to Mammoth Cave in there, and Warrior Girl decided she could live with that. So we headed home… and it rained the whole way.
But, again, the food photos are all borrowed glory; none of those are ours. Although I am kicking myself for it now, I didn't even take along a camera when we went to the Magic Kingdom, because there are so many genius photographers on the Dis I figured there wasn't much point to it. Pretty much everything I saw there has been covered by more talented photographers, and even a few things I hadn't seen before I could track down once I knew what to go looking for. Not bringing a camera was still an error on my part, but I do I think this thread is evidence that there are many talented people sharing their work on the 'net. 
Need to get back! Although I do remember the picnic basket, I think:
Lot of smokers at that hour for some reason, so they were kind of spread out: yet another reason I want to do this part of the park first next time.
Right now we're more about getting to stuff before it's gone! 
Still freaking out about the FotLK maybe not being there by the time we get to Animal Kingdom. Although our odds are better going in January than they are for May, at least.
But we did have a few more things planned -- a museum in Georgia, and Mammoth Cave our last day. 
Although we had not yet picked up the fact that we somehow never get to whatever we planned for our last day...
Good to have you. 
Joining in! I'm loving all your photos!
But, while he was stalling, the price went up. 
Not by much, actually -- about fifty bucks a week -- but it's irritating. Temporarily switched me into Super Economy Mode, meaning I got to seriously thinking we can get something through RCI's Last Call, which means I have to wait until about a month and a half ahead before I can make the reservation -- assuming there's anything left to reserve. 
)
The next time they did a Shakespearean play, Mr. Cool decided he'd rather work backstage. 
So the kids had to carry the suitcases to the stairs instead of being able to just roll them. 
