Knoxville, Tennessee

We are always amazed at the interesting cities that we "discover" as we make this journey across the United States. We can't say that Knoxville, Tennessee, was one of our destinations on this journey, but we were pleasantly surprised at how much fun we had here. This mural on the outside wall of the visitor's center helps to sum up some of the fun things to do here.

In the bottom left-hand corner are two bikers, symbolic of the greenways dispersed throughout town that make for some great biking.

We started there along the Tennessee River, another of the symbols painted in the mural above. There are multiple bridges across the river, making for pretty back drops along the ride.

We took the turn north away from the river to enter the section of the greenway that encircles the World's Fair Park. Knoxville hosted the World's Fair in 1982, attended by 11 million people from around the world. The most notable addition to the Knoxville sky line for the fair was the Sunsphere, the 75-foot golden glass globe set atop a 266-foot tower.

The facilities they built for the fair are still available for tourists like us 34 years later. So we rode the free elevator up the tower to the observation deck inside the sphere. From our height above Knoxville, we could look down through the tinted windows towards the river and the University of Tennessee campus far below us. We could see that the football stadium is right on the Tennessee River. We plan to visit there later today.

After the long elevator ride down to the bottom of the platform, we rode our bikes to the north end of the World's Fair Park. In the shadow of the tall Sunsphere is an urban splash park that was very popular on this summer day.

The other popular activity we witnessed today at the park were several groups of people playing the newly released Pokemon Go game. It was good to see so many video game players outside staring at a screen instead of inside staring at a screen.

We biked back down the greenway to our parking lot. Since it was getting warm by now, we did make a little detour through the splash pad for bicyclers.

We had to end our bike ride, because we had an appointment at noon. Every week day at 12:00, the Knoxville Visitor Center hosts an hour-long radio program called "The Blue Plate Special" for station WDVX at 89.9 FM. There is a stage for the live performers that will be heard on the daily show. Our first performer was a young man named Andrew Tufano, who played the guitar and sang songs that he had written himself. He is from Nashville, but was taking a two-week tour with his fiddle-playing friend from Boston.

The show is emceed from a chair right behind us, and we were live and "on air" except for a few commercial messages.

It was during those commercial messages that a band named "Vivants" got set up on stage for the second half of the show. From San Francisco, they were finishing up an east coast tour. Both of the groups played first-rate blue grass music. We felt like we had front row seats at the best show in town.

We have visited enough cities to know that parking is always a head ache. They have free two-hour parking permits at the visitor center, and that gave us a little extra time to walk around downtown while we were there. We saw Market Square and Krutch Park before we left for our next destination--the University of Tennessee. Two weeks ago, this community lost their famous and much-loved girls' basketball coach. They are expecting the 20,000-seat gymnasium to be full for Pat Summitt's memorial that will be held here in two days. We will be sure to avoid the crowds of Knoxville that day, but there are already memorial flowers showing up at her statue on campus.

We love to visit universities, but parking is usually difficult. We found there are a limited number of parking spaces available at the university museum, so we snagged one of those two-hour permits. That was within easy walking distance of the Neyland Stadium where the University of Tennessee Volunteers play football.

We were looking for an opening to see inside the stadium. Instead, we found this larger-than-life statue of the stadium's name sake, General Neyland.

When Mark finds an open door or gate, he is fearless about walking in like he knows what he is doing. Denisa is usually following behind timidly, worried that we are going to get in trouble for being in the wrong place. Here Mark is walking through one of the inside tunnels of the stadium with the lockers and athlete dining areas, etc.

One of the most famous University of Tennessee alumni is Peyton Manning, who the locker complex is named after.

Mark's snooping brought us to the stadium entry that leads right through the goal post entrance onto the field. This football program has seen 5 national championship, with the latest in 1998.

Acting just like he knew what he was doing, Mark marched right into the stadium for this picture.

From that vantage point, we could see the six different players whose numbers have been retired at the University of Tennessee. Of course, one of those was Peyton Manning.

As we walked around campus, we found the Volunteer statue with its ever-burning torch. Considering that temperatures were nearing 100 degrees today, we didn't linger long in this sunny area with its extra hot torch.

Instead, we headed indoors to the nicely air-conditioned McClung Museum. With sections featuring Egyptian history, dinosaurs, and native Americans, it was a nice place to spend an hour on a hot afternoon. Thanks to the University of Tennessee for hosting a great museum with free admission.

As we left downtown Knoxville, we noted the dramatic clouds meeting us on the highway. A cloud structure narrowing to a point like this would give us reason to pause in Oklahoma. But the forecast here was for lots of rain and some straight line winds instead.

We decided to wait out the storm eating dinner at Chick-fil-a. It was their annual "Cow Appreciation Day," and anyone wearing anything cow-like could order an entree of their choice for free. Before we left the motor home this morning, we had an arts and crafts project to build something cow-like from our limited craft resources. Let's just say that it looks like Mark won the cow-like contest, since Denisa's mask turned out looking more like a pig.

It was fun to watch the different cow-like costumes show up at our Chick-fil-a.

Some of the costumes even came with signs.

We really liked our time in the city of Knoxville, and we hope to make another 30-minute drive to the city before we leave the area. If we do, it will surely include another stop for the "Blue Plate Special."