Author: Mike Pekrul

Well, the question has always been “where’s the best place you’ve been?” We’re spending the week in Townsend Tennessee. I’ve been coming here for over 50 years. Townsend is the tiny little gateway town to Great Smoky Mountain National Park, and more specifically, Cades Cove, a small valley area in the west end of GSMNP,…

I went to Greece today. Kinda. Way back in 1897, to celebrate the centennial of Tennessee becoming a state, they held The Tennessee Centennial Exposition in Nashville. All kinds of fun exhibits and events, kinda like a world’s fair, it drew crowds from all over the country. Nashville’s population was under 100,000 at the time,…

O WaHo, my WaHo, how I missed thee so. Your glistening white orbs, so delicately cracked and deliciously prepared over medium. Your shredded potatoes, so golden and crisply fried to perfection. Scattered. Smothered. Covered. Peppered. Those beautifully sizzling strips of bacon, and lightly buttered toast. O WaHo you bring the light to my morning, the…

“… with my feet ten feet off of Beale” We went out on the town last night, to Beale Street. The music and entertainment district in Memphis started as a commercial hub in the 1840’s and became the “home of the blues” after the Civil War. It reminded me a lot of Bourbon Street in…

This morning, Graceland! What visit to Memphis can be complete without a visit to Graceland, especially for folks of my generation who actually remember and lived through the years when Elvis Presley was alive. Elvis was in on the birth of rock and roll music in the 1950’s, and his meteoric rise to stardom influenced…

Memphis was a center point in the civil rights movement in the US, all the way from pre-civil war America into the 1960’s and through to today. The Lorraine Motel, the location of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, has been turned into the National Civil Rights Museum. Exhibits and artifacts document the way…

Busy day today, so much to see and do around here. We started on another rails-to-trails hike, this time on a mile-long bridge across the Mississippi, crossing from Arkansas to Tennessee and back. Our next stop was Mud Island in Memphis. It’s a nice park, but they have the coolest thing… a scale model of…

Monday was moving day again. This time we’re camped on the banks of The Big Muddy. Ol’ Man River. The Mighty Mississipp. We’re across the river from Memphis TN, on the Arkansas side. Watching the constant barge traffic go up and down river. Big ones. Small ones. Sometimes just a push boat by itself. But…

We’ve spent the week in Branson MO. What can I say?? It’s Pigeon Forge but more spread out and with less traffic. “Usually” we stick to nature and parks, stuff like that, but a few places we did “tourist” stuff. Austin. Seattle. Branson is nothing if not a tourist town. Country music. Gospel. Comedy shows…

On previous road trips, I’ve driven eight, ten, even twelve hr days. No biggie, you do what it takes to get where you want to go and when you want to be there. I drove six hours today and I was so happy to exit the truck. Ten months into our epic journey and we…