Tennesse and Alabama

Since we had driven so much further than we had planned yesterday, today’s drive wasn’t going to be much, only a little over 300 miles if we had driven straight through.  Since we had so much time, we slept in a little bit and took our time driving to Huntsville.  We might have even gone a little out of our way!  We woke up at about 7:30, showered and went down for breakfast.  One of the perks of the Holiday Inn Express chain is free breakfast.  We’re not talking a sit down breakfast with omelets, it is more a continental breakfast, with eggs, bacon, yogurt, toast, and Chris’s favorite, biscuits and gravy. 

We left the hotel in a light drizzle and found a geocache that had been calling our name since we pulled in the night before.  This one was a magnetic hide-a-key hidden under the lip of a storm drain. We’ve seen that kind of hide a bunch of times before but it is still pretty clever.  We didn’t really need gas yet but the gasbuddy app said that there was $3.45 gas only 25 miles away so we stopped there.  Who knows when we will see that again?  After leaving the gas station we drove for a couple of more hours.  We passed Knoxville where traffic was heavy, but moving fairly fast.  We had stayed in Knoxville on our last trip to Huntsville last December.  We ended up staying downtown and we were lucky enough to be there the same night they shut down the downtown for a Santa parade.  We didn’t have the time to stop today and we doubted there was a parade, so we kept going.  We crossed into the Central time zone at noon, so just like that it became 11 AM again.  We like heading west across time zones because we get an extra hour in the day.  We soon stopped again at a rest area where they had vending machines that took credit cards.  We wondered why this isn’t more common.  We found another geocache at the rest area.  This was more an excuse to stretch our legs than it was to find the cache.  The wind was really picking up and it was actually kind of cold. 

Our next stop was a winery.  We hadn’t planned on stopping but we saw a billboard on I-40 advertising it, so we pulled off the exit and stopped.  We enjoyed a free wine tasting, something that seems less common back home (they usually charge a few dollars), and much to our surprise they gave us 10 tastings!  That is completely unheard of back home.  We ended up buying some wine.  Jackie doesn’t want to say how many bottles we bought but Chris admits it was more than a couple.  When we were checking out the lady who served us asked us if we had been to the treehouse yet.  Huh?  We said no, she got all excited and said we had to go see the biggest treehouse in the world, which was less than 10 minutes away.  She gave us directions and said we would be impressed.