Well…we are almost at the end of this AMAZING trip! It’s been two months filled with amazing scenery, fantastic waterfalls, fun hikes, HARD hikes, good food, lots of laughs, and memories made with friends that we will cherish forever! And like the saying goes, “all good things must come to an end.” That’s a tough one because we just LOVE traveling with our Airstream trailer! We have seen places we might never have seen and done things we might never have done! We are thankful and feel blessed!
We left Santa Fe and our next stop was Nashville, Tennessee!!! We love Nashville! We had a stop in Amarillo, Texas where we got to celebrate Leonard’s birthday with a fun dinner at the Big Texan Steak Ranch Restaurant! But first we stopped at Cadillac Ranch to spray paint a Cadillac again! We had done this two years ago and it was fun to do it again!
After the spray painting, we headed off to dinner! The Big Texan Steak Ranch Restaurant is hard to miss! As you drive down the interstate, you see the “Big Texan” standing high and almost waving you in!
We have eaten here two other times, and Leonard wanted to go back to celebrate his birthday – it was a great night and delicious food! We even had musicians serenade him for his birthday!
(I can only do 10 seconds on each video, so I made it three parts – enjoy!)
The next day we were up early and back on the road – headed for a stop in Oklahoma City! We stayed at a nice campground and had a relaxing evening – because it was back on the road again the next day!
Our next stop was Little Rock, Arkansas, where we stopped and spent two nights – we needed a day to rest in between places! The campground here is right next to two bridges going into downtown Little Rock, so Leonard likes to say we are “trolls under the bridge” – haha! We have stayed here before and we love it – it’s right on the river, and there’s river traffic, bridge traffic, and we can see all the buildings downtown! We stayed for two nights because we just needed a “rest” day between driving and more driving! We found a fun coffee place – no surprise – and had a yummy drink after walking across one of the bridges by the campground! Then we went to a great brewery for an early dinner – once again, yummy food at a fun place!
For the final “real” destination on our itinerary, we headed to Nashville!!! One of our favorite campgrounds is here in Nashville – ELM HILL RV RESORT – let me just show you some photos of our campsite and you ‘ll see why!
All three of our campsites were right on the lake, and because we back up to it, I was able to leave our back curtains open the entire time!!! No one can see inside at night!
It was a great day at the campground, just sitting outside enjoying the weather and the view of the lake – the next day we headed west of Nashville for brunch at the Loveless Café!! We went here two years ago and loved it, so we did it again!
It was a Friday, so we wore RED – (Remember Everyone Deployed) – had to get a photo!
The Loveless Café is a legendary Nashville roadside landmark famous for its down-home hospitality, retro décor and scratch-made Southern comfort food – ESPECIALLY BISCUITS!
It started in 1951 when Lon and Annie Loveless began serving fried chicken and homemade food to travelers out of the front door of their home – it grew from a small stop with picnic tables into a full restaurant and motel (the motel rooms have been converted into shops on the property). It has a fun and nostalgic vibe, defined by its iconic neon highway sign and country charm! They are most known for their biscuits and fried chicken!!!
The way home took us through downtown Nashville, and by Vanderbilt University (where Leonard went to school MANY years ago!). It’s fun because he showed us some things he remembered and LOTS of things that weren’t there when he was!! Needless to say, it looks totally different from way back when! We went down Broadway, through Printers Alley (where all the restaurants and bars are – with music playing from every one of them!) – it was a Friday afternoon at 1:30 and the place was HOPPING! Music everywhere, people everywhere, noise everywhere…You would have thought it was 8 pm on a weekend night!
One more stop before heading back to the campground – the Parthenon! It’s the world’s only full-scale, exact-size replica of the original ancient Greek temple in Athens, Greece! It was built in 1897 as the centerpiece for the Tennessee Centennial Exposition and it celebrated Nashville’s identity as the “Athens of the South” because of its focus on higher education! It was supposed to be temporary, but the people loved the building so much that it was reconstructed to be permanent!! It mimics the original and shows how ancient Greek temples actually looked! Inside the main hall, there is a 42-foot-tall statue of the goddess Athena and is the largest indoor sculpture in the Western Hemisphere!!! The lower level is a museum!
What a fun and full day we had in Nashville – back to the campground for the rest of the day – in the rain! It POURED when we got back – all of us said that our favorite sound in the Airstream trailers is the sound of rain hitting the aluminum roof! It’s a relaxing and soothing sound! Everyone was a little quieter that night and a little sad at the fact that the trip is over – it always comes with mixed emotions – we all know that we need to get back to reality and to home and family, but it’s so fun being on the road, seeing the beauty of this country with each other!
We are SO blessed to have these opportunities and don’t want to ever take it for granted! I’m so thankful also that I can share it with all of you – thanks for coming along with us each year!
Our friends left, and we are here in Nashville one more day – it was sad to look out of the window and see an empty campsite next to us after they left.
We had one more “friend encounter” here in Nashville – when Andrew was on deployment on the USS Theodore Roosevelt years ago, I joined a prayer group with some moms to pray for our boys on the ship. Five years later we still do zoom calls all together, and one of the moms I met first is the mom of one of Andrew’s good friends!!! What a small world it is – Linda and her husband, Denny, live in Nashville, so we met for lunch on our last day!!!!! Thank you, Linda and Denny, for taking time out to meet up with us – we had a great time and a great meal!
We can’t believe how many people we have seen along the way on this trip – some planned and some not – the ones NOT planned still amaze me – how we can be SO many miles from home and see someone we haven’t seen in years – even back to high school!!! The world really is so small!
Leonard and I have three more days of travel to get back to Florida – we are stopping in Alabama to have a few things done on the trailer and then it will really be over! It’s been amazing!!!
UNTIL NEXT TIME…
What an amazing trip and an amazing country we live in. Thanks for taking us along with you.
Wow. Hard to believe it’s over right.
So many beautiful sites. So many amazing coastlines and waterfalls and hiking trails and mountains and lakes and coffees and biscuits and good food. I must say, since I had not seen it before, but one of my favorite pictures is the barn. Me and Teresa love barns and we check them out anywhere and everywhere we see them. We would love to have a barn house and that one would be fantastic….That is one cool barn.
Love ya and see ya soon.
LOVE the picture summary and have do enjoyed “living vicariously” through you! Thank you.😁