Headed to Knoxville

Captain's Log - Day 22

After tallying the votes, it looks like Knoxville is the winner! The people have spoken, and we're on our way!

Having learned a lesson after getting shut out of the TennTom, I checked the Tennessee River for lock closings and found that the Chattanooga lock will be shut down for a few weeks beginning July 20th at 6am. That gives us roughly 300 miles to cover in six days, so we've got to stay on schedule!

After weighing anchor this morning, we stopped at Birdsong Marina to get gas. The owner of the Marina, Bob Keast, told us a few stories and sold us a map of the Tennessee River! They stopped printing these in 2003, so we were pretty glad to get our hands on one!

Bob is quite the character. The best way to describe him (at least to the family) is ... well, imagine if Pop owned a marina. That's pretty much Bob. He had a building (resembling a pole barn) on a barge in the marina that he told us he's going to transform into a restaurant! As we were leaving the marina, he took our picture and told us to look for it on his website, here.

We left and got another day of smooth sailing under our collective belt! Also, does all this ridiculous scenery remind anyone else of Bob Ross (rest in peace)? I can hear him now, painting little friends for all his temporarily lonely trees .. *sigh* ...

We're at Clifton Marina tonight. When we looked up Clifton online, the interwebs told us that 2700 people live here. When we arrived, we were informed that there are 700 townsfolk and 2000 inmates in Clifton ... Wikipedia, you have failed me for the last time!

Clifton Marina has a courtesy car (as some marina's do) which we borrowed to venture into town and find dinner. Before we hopped in their mid nineties Buick Regal, we were given a screwdriver and told not to put it in park! Evidently once it gets into park it doesn't get our unless you jam this screwdriver somewhere down in the console.

This poor Buick had a host of other problems as well ... The rear driver's side window wouldn't roll up, which probably explained the two inches of standing water in the back seat! They needed a bilge pump back there! She also steered and sounded like someone had replaced the bearings with gravel and let half the air out of one tire!

After driving around a few minutes without finding any restaurants open, we stopped at the Bear Inn to ask for recommendations. What's the first thing I did? Put it in park. I instantly realized my blunder. But to be fair, that's instinctual at this point - mere muscle memory! You stop, you shift into park; you stop, you shift into park; you stop, you shift into park. I've been doing this for 14 years now! (Deanne, are you taking notes?)

Simon and I jimmied that shifter with the screwdriver for 30 to 45 minutes before throwing in the towel and calling the marina for help. The proprietress came and tried to fix it, but without any success. She left the car where it was, with the keys in the ignition, commenting, "we don't want to make it too hard for somebody to steal it!"

She gave us a ride to the marina and then told us we could use a truck parked in their lot. The keys were in it with a little tag on them that said "Gene's Truck." Thanks, Gene. She was obviously upset with her husband who hadn't had the car fixed, who in turn was obviously upset with us for forcing him to have to do something about their marginally salvageable Buick in the near future.

Exhausted and starving by this time, Simon and I headed for the only restaurant still open in town - the Country Girl. It's in a truck stop, and all the locals warned us that the food wasn't very good. To the contrary, however, we found that it was quite good! Either that or we've been on the river too long!

Speaking of country girls, it's been awhile since I've been in the south, and I'd almost forgotten how fetching a southern accent can be in a young lady :)